


The Eighth Doctor Adventures

by Edoe



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-06-30 06:20:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 34,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15746022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edoe/pseuds/Edoe
Summary: Once upon a time, there was a man called the Doctor. And this is his life, from unyielding love and heartbreaking loss, to closest family and deadliest enemies. The Eighth Doctor is an engima to the Doctor Who universe - but these are his adventures, life breathed into them as you have never seen before.





	1. Half the World Away (part 1)

**Author's Note:**

> The Eighth Doctor Adventures is a retelling of the life of the Eighth Doctor, from the TV Movie through to The Night of the Doctor. Other than these two episodes, the fic offers a completely original take on his story, drawing on characters, monsters, villains, and settings from across the show's mythos, but relying on lots of original content too!
> 
> The early years of the Eighth Doctor's life were overseen by the amazing Janine Rivers, who wrote Series 1-4 of The Eighth Doctor Adventures, before entrusting me with the series and letting me finish off the Eighth Doctor's story. Janine's first four series can be found here (http://doctorwhofanfic.weebly.com/the-eighth-doctor-adventures.html), and I will be posting my work on the series (Series 5 onwards) on my Ao3 account (this one!!). 
> 
> The two 'eras' are very different and my Ao3 work can be read without having read Series 1-4. Alternatively if you want to start from now but aren't entirely comfortable going in without info from Series 1-4, The Story So Far can catch you up on the basics of what's happened so far (http://doctorwhofanfic.weebly.com/eda-story-so-far.html). That being said, I would totally recommend at some point reading Series 1-4, because Janine is such a fantastic writer!
> 
> The first episode of Series 5 is entitled Half the World Away - as I tend to write long episodes I have divided the series into shorter chapters and intend to post the fic like that to make it more readable for everyone ^_^ We start off meeting Lizzie Darwin, an original companion through whom I have channelled a lot of my personality and feelings towards the world, although our pasts are very different. Because of this she means a lot to me and I hope you like her!
> 
> Anyways, I hope you enjoy the fic as much as I have enjoyed working on it, and thank you so much for taking the time to give it a read! :)
> 
> \- Ed

_Then, she began to breathe and live,_

_and every moment took her to a place where goodbyes were hard to come by._

_she was in love, but not in love with someone or something, she was in love with her life._

_and for the first time, in a long time,_

_everything was inspiring._

_\- R. M. Drake._

**Prologue**

Lizzie sat on a chair that was probably a bit too big for a six-year-old, since her feet couldn’t touch the ground and were left dangling in the air. She was watching the sunlight streaming in through the window, fascinated with how it made the buckles on her shoes glimmer and shine. Jenny had told her to put on these shoes on because they were her best pair, and they made her look ‘smart.’ This was the same Jenny that called her Elizabeth, so Lizzie thought she was a bit posh and didn’t like puppies or ice cream or fun.

Lizzie watched her shoes because she didn’t want to look out the window – all the other children were playing outside, in the afternoon summer sun, and she wanted nothing more than to join in, but she wasn’t allowed. She thought it was probably Jenny’s way of being nasty to her, because it didn’t make any sense – she hadn’t done anything wrong. Even though this wasn’t her real home, Lizzie still liked the other children, but she didn’t always join in. Sometimes they just didn’t want her.

The office was dusty, and Lizzie watched as the particles of dust floated and fell through the air. She reached out to touch them, but they flew just out of reach whenever she tried. Eventually, she gave up and slumped backwards in the chair, bored, and waiting for Jenny to come back and tell her why she had to sit here alone.

The door opened, and Jenny walked in. She looked down upon Lizzie, as if Lizzie were an alien. She had not come alone.

“Elizabeth – this is Maggie. She wants to talk with you.”

Lizzie had learned that there wouldn’t be any point in replying. Whatever Jenny wanted would happen anyway, so she waited, in silence.

The woman who pulled up a chair opposite her was older than Jenny. Lizzie liked her patterned cardigan. Unlike Jenny, this lady didn’t talk to her as if she were stupid.

“Hello Lizzie,” Maggie smiled at her. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” Lizzie replied, still slightly unsettled by how friendly this woman called Maggie was being. “How are you?”

The only reason she responded that way was because that’s what adults told her to say.

“I’m very well, thank you. Have you been enjoying the sunny weather?”

“It’s alright,” Lizzie said. “I can go and play outside then. But I like the rain too.”

“Do you?”

“Without rain – things wouldn’t grow.”

The woman-called-Maggie hesitated for a second. “Yes – well done. Now – what sort of things do you like doing, Lizzie?”

“Erm… I like television and I like music, and also like to read lots of books. Also, I like dogs, but only small ones. The big ones are scary. I like cats more than dogs. They’re nicer and we get along better.”

“Now then, Lizzie. My name is Maggie – and, I can’t be sure, but someone tells me that you’re a bit sad.”

**THE EIGHTH DOCTOR ADVENTURES**

**SERIES 5 - EPISODE 1**

**HALF THE WORLD AWAY**

**WRITTEN BY ED GOUNDREY-SMITH**

“Hello?”

Lizzie was jolted awake from her daydream. 

“Oh – er – I am so sorry, Mrs Smith.” 

She stood up quickly, because she wasn’t particularly up for losing her job. 

“Away with the fairies again, Elizabeth?”

To be fair, to kill hours of boredom, yes, she had been away with the fairies. Her boss (not Mrs Smith) tended to leave her to it, while he went off and did whatever it was the people like him did. It meant that Lizzie saw the inside of the café more than anything else, due to the fact that, barring the girl who came in for a Saturday job, she was the café’s sole fulltime employee. 

“Something like that. What can I get for you, Mrs Smith?”

“My usual, please.”

She knew exactly what that “usual” was, due to the fact she served it to Mrs. Smith every Wednesday morning at about half ten-ish, give or take the cooperation of Mrs Smith’s springer spaniels. Her tea would require just a ‘dribble’ of milk, and a slice of carrot cake to go with it.

Since Mrs Smith also pulled a blinder of a question with each visit to the café, Lizzie awaited, with bated breath, for said question to arise.

“So, Elizabeth.”

Here we go.

“What are you going to do with your life?”

And there it was. Mrs Smith knew it irritated her, and yet she always posed the same question every single time. Lizzie resented her enquiries for a number of reasons:

1\. It was as if Mrs Smith were deliberately trying to make her feel guilty about something she couldn’t do anything about, and…

2\. … if Mrs Smith actually cared about “Elizabeth’s” situation, she might understand that perhaps the vote Mrs Smith took part in every 5 years at the polls was not helping “Elizabeth” at all. And, furthermore…

3\. Mrs Smith was renowned for being particularly harsh on anyone from the estate, where she knew Lizzie lived.

“I don’t know yet, Mrs Smith,” she replied as she poured Mrs Smith’s tea into the mug, and then added in the ‘dribble of milk’. Lizzie had decided, as her boss had suggested, to at least attempt small talk, since her customer service skills were ‘significantly lacking’. The idea was repulsive to Lizzie but she soldiered on. Luckily, she knew the way to Mrs. Smith’s heart: “How are your dogs?”

After spending so long watching this particular middle class wife of a doctor, who instead of drinking from the fountain of eternal youth, seemed to drink from the fountain of eternal 60-something, Lizzie had realised that Mrs Smith rather liked dogs. Lizzie was more of a cat person herself.

Not unexpectedly Mrs Smith responded with great enthusiasm! “Well, I had to take Jasper to the vets. He required some inoculations. And Peter is as feisty as ever. He’s so tricky to take for a walk, goes straight for the pheasants! But it’s always worth it! I do love him.”

“There we go,” Lizzie passed over the mug, doing her best not-real-smile. “Call me over if you need anything.”

Lizzie partly said this last bit just to wind her up, knowing full well that Mrs Smith would desire nothing more than to call her over and complain about something petty, while expressing her profound concern about Lizzie allowing her standards to slip.

“I will,” nodded Mrs. Smith, a grim look on her face, as she withdrew to the corner by the window where she could see her dogs. Lizzie pitied anyone who might attempt to sit in Mrs Smith’s corner seat. It had become her territory, her place, and no one else would dare even attempt to annex it from her, no matter how unwittingly.

Lizzie had grown accustomed to the habits and behaviours of each of her café regulars. She knew their orders – what they ate, what they drank, whether they took milk or sugar– and whether they would come in pairs, or alone. In fact, for a lowly waitress who merely poured the tea and coffee, and cut and served the cake, Lizzie was privy to more knowledge than perhaps she should be. People gave away a lot more during everyday conversation than they realized. Not that any of it was of particular concern to her – but still…. 

It was a nice little tea room. Lizzie would even have gone so far as to say that if she didn’t spend so many waking hours in here, she would love it. It was a cosy little shop, its walls hung with framed paintings of pretty country scenes, of the harvest, and of shooting parties, in either watercolour or oil. An eclectic assortment of ornaments decorated its oak shelves as well as the mantelpiece of an unused fireplace. The shop’s entire trade came from customers shopping in the little market town. 

Lizzie realized rather quickly after she started working here that she spent so much of her time just doing nothing. She was often left alone with her teacakes; left alone to find some way of occupying herself.

Sometimes she loved that part of it.

Sometimes she just wanted to get out

***

5 o’clock eventually came.

She then set the alarm, installed a few years back, stepped out into the evening air, and locked the door behind her. It was summer, and the weather was warm and sleepy, like the town itself. Dunsworth was not the sort of place for anyone looking for thrills and exhilaration. There was a bus stop, just down the street, where you could catch a bus that went right up to the edge of the estate. It was a bus she could take, but rarely did because she enjoyed the walk; it wasn’t far.  
Dunsworth was dotted with small cafés, and boutiques, and general gift shops for anyone who came to enjoy the typical middle England life, with an old castle looking down from on the top of the hill. Dunsworth had been twinned with a town in Germany and another in Italy. Recently, it had won the “Britain in Bloom” competition three years in a row, and another five wins before that. There were a number of retired couples who lived there, and some young families whose dad was likely a banker in the city or whose mum babysat for the lord of the manor. They all lived quietly, and contentedly. 

It was quiet. Except – not always. Because there was…the estate. 

Lizzie’s former home, once situated on the outskirts of Dunsworth, was no longer on the outskirts of Dunsworth. Seven years ago, the council had made the decision to build a council estate there instead. 

The council would’ve gotten a friendlier reaction had they decided to kick a nest of very angry wasps. 

There was an immediate uproar from the legions of pensioners. Lizzie, at the time, was still in school, still hating school, and remembered it well. There were protests….well, not really protests, more like a few disgruntled elderly ladies who stood outside the library, holding hand- painted protest signs. There was rioting… well, again, not really rioting, more a matter of angry planning in the café. There were petitions and there were letters to the council. The council retorted with a perfectly understandable response: They needed housing. There wasn’t enough of it. 

It was at this point that Lizzie first began to dislike the residents of Dunsworth and had not-so-fervently celebrated when she finally left to study history at Durham. The care home where she had grown up was delighted for her; her teachers were delighted.

Student life, it transpired, was not for her. The endless partying was nauseating.

However, it seemed you can do whatever you want at university and there’s usually no positive outcome when you graduate. Ever. No jobs. At all. Especially for people with history degrees. It was because of this non-positive outcome, that Lizzie had come back to stay in the town she’d grown up in and, after getting the job in the café, had found asylum in one of the properties on the estate. It was only meant to be a temporary measure until something better came up.

But nothing better had come up. 

She would stand at the edge of the valley – there was a sort of observational area, fenced off, where one could sit on a bench, and look out into the distance. The view was beautiful, and it was possible to sit there and watch the sunset, over fields and distant cottages and great tall oak trees. 

Even when there seemed like there would never be a chance to escape her present existence, she could come here and dream for ten minutes, before she had to return to her reality.

She stopped this particular evening, and sat for five minutes, letting the rest of the world pass her by. She could do that– just sit, and drink in the view before her each evening after work. The sunsets were always magical. Now June had passed, and the nights would start to draw in a little earlier, meaning she could look forward to that magic more and more, especially after long and pointless days at work. 

On this evening, only five minutes passed and Lizzie left the bench earlier than usual. She wanted to pay someone a visit.

 

***

Lizzie still had a key to the house where she had grown up, because now as a “responsible” adult, she was always the one on cat feeding duty and plant watering duty whenever Maggie went away, which was rare, but occasionally she’d go and stay with her children.

The hallway was cramped – all the houses on the estate were small, and the flats were even smaller. A staircase led upstairs, and after one of Maggie’s hearty meals, one would have to breathe in deeply to get past the chest of drawers on the way through the hallway and into the kitchen. 

Lizzie hung up her coat, and walked through into the kitchen, where Maggie stood fiddling with the oven.

“Oh, hello!” Maggie called over. “Just putting the tea on. Do you want some, or will you be off?” Maggie murmured. “Honestly, this oven is five years old and I still can’t figure out how to – oh. There we go.”

“Now. Sit down,” she said to Lizzie, while bustling about the kitchen. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

“No, I’ll do it,” Lizzie offered, walking past her.

“Elizabeth, sit down. You spend enough time making tea, let me do it. I hate thinking of you in that godawful café all day.” 

Lizzie was okay with Maggie calling her Elizabeth because she would do it in a friendly way whenever jokily telling her off; it was kind of heart-warming and made Lizzie smile. 

“You’re going to go insane,” Maggie told her, as she bustled around the kitchen with the tea bags.

“It won’t be long before I lose it.” 

“You’ll find something better. You deserve to, at least.”

“I did three years in university and I’ve got like –,” she sighed. “I’m tens of thousands of pounds in debt. Nobody needs people who’ve just graduated and have ‘no experience’.”

“But you’re intelligent! Even if you have no experience, as you say, there’d be people wanting to snap you up. I just can’t believe the current state of things. I swear it’s nigh on impossible to get work nowadays. When I was young…”

As Lizzie listened, she was feeling a tangled mix of emotions, most of them guilt-related, or just general panic and anxiety about how she was wasting her life. She longed to be out, travelling the world, walking across mountains, and deserts, and swimming near coral reefs, and doing whatever it was that well-travelled people did, like the things her Facebook friends did. But she was stuck, as if the universe were conspiring to stop her from doing any of that stuff, while at the same time it seemed to be reaping her of every penny she had. And, she acknowledged, she was increasingly anxious about all this anxiety and was spending some Sunday mornings (the café wasn’t open on Sundays – an overly religious community and all that) lying in bed and not doing anything useful at all.

“It’s that flat as well,” Maggie continued. “It’s tiny, and it’s in such a rough part of the estate. You know, I’d have you stay here, but the system won’t have it. Honestly, I can understand why you’re so anti-THEM. But ‘improper’ they said! Improper. You’ve been out of the system for years, and Mikey moved out last month. I haven’t been alone here for 40 years, and I think I’m going to go doolally if I start now. You are all that keeps me from losing my marbles.” 

Maggie stopped, and sat down opposite her. Lizzie looked up from the table and into the old woman’s eyes. Maggie had seen so much and Lizzie always felt as if she were being a burden. 

“But I’d rather lose my marbles than hold you back. You’re special. I always said so to that care worker. You’re the most intelligent child I’ve ever worked with. No, not just intelligent. Understanding. So, I want you to go out, and live a bit.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just – I can’t. Things are –”

“I know. Money. It’s annoying, isn’t it? That, and, of course, you’re so nervous.”

She always loved Maggie for being so straight to the point.

“I’ve been there,” Maggie took a sip of her tea. “When my mother dropped me off in my own flat for the first time, she helped me unpack everything, and then suddenly said ‘Bye then’ and was off. And I sat there alone on my sofa, this old thing we’d been keeping in the attic for years. For a few seconds, I was fine, just like being left on my own of an afternoon. Then, it hit me. She wasn’t coming back. Suddenly, it was very quiet and very cold. And I was alone. Oh – Lizzie, I know your worries almost as well as I know my own. I’ve been privy to them since you were a little girl. You were such a sad little thing, and I look at you now, and sometimes I think you’re not any different. I know how you’re feeling. But there is something you need to remember: you’re never alone. Not really. If everyone vanished from the Earth – there’ll always be someone here, for you and with you.” 

Maggie had been Lizzie’s support worker since she was 6 years old. Nowadays, it wasn’t anything formal, but Lizzie still stopped by every so often for a cup of tea and a chat. Maggie was an incredible woman, and the closest thing Lizzie had to a mother. She treated the children she worked with as if they were her own, and all of them treated her like a mum.

*** 

 

It was getting dark as Lizzie arrived back home.

There were two women, probably high or drunk or something, and they stood at the end of the road, catcalling and giggling, waving vigorously at her as she walked past. She smiled at them before turning the key into the rusty lock, pressing against the door with her foot (it would often stick, and require an extra bit of force) and making her way inside.

Her flat was indeed tiny, as Maggie continued to point out. But it was home, at least. Her front door opened up against stacks of books – there wasn’t enough space for them all on her bookshelves, so she had piled some of them up against the hallway wall, a bit too near the door, apparently. There was a bedroom off to the right, and the living room/kitchen diner just ahead.

It was tidy, but looked lived-in as well. Lizzie was partial to the term ‘cluttered’. As already implied, the bookshelves were full, with some smaller novellas stacked lengthways on top of the other books. And on the top of the same unit were some old shoeboxes gathering dust, containing remnants of her childhood and of her school days.

The floor space was relatively uncluttered and clean, with a coffee table and a sofa, both of which she’d picked up from a charity shop. The kitchenette was accompanied by a little table and two chairs, none of which matched. But Lizzie liked it – she appreciated the individuality of it all.

On the wall above her table was a pin board, where she kept a few photos and postcards, and notelets to herself to remind her to take the bins out and such. There was a window opposite her sofa, looking out onto the street below. As she entered her flat and before she flopped down on the sofa and closed her eyes, Lizzie drew the tartan curtains, and switched on the fairy lights that ran from the window, above the TV, and around into the kitchen diner. 

Time passed, with her just sitting there, wasting it, before she opened her eyes and looked up to see a battered novel on the coffee table, waiting for her. She loved books. As a child, she’d been such an avid reader, and often had her nose buried in a book. It was comforting, having the struggles of someone else to escape into, and it was heartening how those struggles could help her understand her own. 

But as she’d grown up, it had become harder to read as much as she used to. Lizzie promised herself, as some kind of New Year’s Resolution (which, if she did say so herself, she was rather good at sticking to), that she would read 20 pages every day, partly so she didn’t feel so rubbish about not having the same bond with stories as she used to. The looming, overstuffed bookshelves were a reminder of the days when that bond was strong and when she had made time for books, before the days she came home, ate alone, washed up, and sat in the dark, empty flat, just dreaming of that time when books were her life. 

This evening, she’d grabbed some chips on her way back home, and had eaten most of them as she walked. It had left her at a loose end, now, as she sat on her sofa, absent-mindedly watching the light fitting (the bulb had no shade), just waiting for something to happen. So, Lizzie took herself off to bed. Maybe sleeping would make her feel better. 

Of course, it didn’t help that Lizzie was an insomniac – and a bad one at that. Some nights she could go off to bed, and sleep just fine. Other nights, she just couldn’t lie still, or get rid of thoughts she didn’t want, and allow herself to be carried off into a world of the not-real and of the seemingly-real, of disjointed, random bits of life, strung together in the form of dreams, almost like little clips of movies uploaded to YouTube – the story, there, but not the whole story.  
But in one way, insomnia worked for Lizzie, though, because sometimes the nights were the only time she could find a way to feel better. The calmness and tranquillity of the small hours, at just gone three, when nobody was awake. 

Nobody at all. 

This was one of those nights, where no matter how much she tried, sleep just refused to come, and she just wanted to go out and wander the Earth as everyone else slept. When these nights came, Lizzie would take herself over to the lone window of the flat, that looked down onto the street below. She was lucky to have one of the flats with an actual window – this was the only flat that had one.

On these nights, Lizzie would pull back the curtain, and sit on the windowsill, looking out at the night- shrouded street outside, and marvelling at how the stars looked down on her from above. She’d shut the curtains behind her, enclosing herself in this little bubble on the edge of reality. It was like she was in a capsule, watching the universe drift by, at the same time the nights would tick by.

It was so comforting to lock herself away like that, a set of curtains blocking out the real world, with a starry world ahead. She’d always found it comforting. Lizzie had memories, of doing this even as a child. When all the others were in bed, and she was the last one awake, she would sit on her windowsill and look out over the garden in the night. 

Blissful moments of solitude.

Tonight, as she watched, the night was calm, and the weather was still. As summer approached, the nights would grow warmer – but there would be storms as well. But tonight, there was no cloud layer, and she could enjoy the never-ending cycle of stars, burning and re-burning in the dome-like impossible navy blue of the night sky above her head. Lizzie sat back, resting her head against the wall and hugging her knees hunched up in front of her, and watched. The temperature by her window was colder than that of the rest of the flat – it made the hairs on her neck and arms stand up, and it chilled her. But it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was almost cathartic. 

Lizzie was thinking how impossible it would be to count how many nights she’d spent like this, by the window. She had lost count, herself. That’s why Lizzie was reasonably certain that, despite the constant change unfolding in the sky, the estate grounds below her window would not be too different whenever she chose to look down. She knew there was another block of flats over the road, exactly the same as hers, with three storeys, one in the middle with a large window. And she knew that if she were to continue down the road to either the left or the right, there would be some houses, paintwork crumbling off them, and litter tossed into their gardens.

So, because of her experienced understanding of the geography of the grounds outside her home, Lizzie Darwin was certain that she had never seen a large blue box on the street corner, just opposite her window.

It was a police box, the sort from 1950s London. It was built from the most beautiful, blue-painted wood, and had a glowing light on its roof, illuminating the various signs on the rest of the box, as well as the area surrounding it, with its warm, yellow, glow. It looked fundamentally normal in terms of its construction, just like a funny little cabinet. And yet she had a strange, nagging feeling, one that people in her favourite books usually felt (and that Lizzie had ridiculed as a child), that whatever the box was, it wasn’t simply someone’s idea of a joke, left out on the street corner as a lark. There was something different about it.

Her mind already had gone straight onto some weird and out-there possibilities before she even dared to consider what was probably the more realistic explanation. After all, in the real world, there was no such thing as a magical blue police box. But Lizzie also knew that nobody would go to so much trouble on just a whim. Why would you even bother building such a thing for ‘a bit of a laugh?’ she quoted herself back to herself, as she often did when she thought she was being stupid. 

For a reason she could not define, Lizzie just knew that somewhere there was such thing as a magical blue police box. 

She threw on some jeans and a t-shirt, grabbed her coat, and sailed out of the flat.


	2. Half the World Away (part 2)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next part of The Eighth Doctor Adventures! Where Lizzie meets the enigmatic Doctor for the first time...
> 
> Hope you enjoy and thanks again for reading ^_^

When she arrived on the street below, Lizzie realised she was definitely not going mad.

There was a man as well.

He was sitting half in and half out of the box, fiddling with something in his hands that looked like some battered piece of technology. She was sceptical about going over to him, and yet, she continued to approach him anyway, because she was curious, and she didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to investigate a weird box that had suddenly appeared on the corner of her street. 

As she neared him, he looked up at her and smiled.

His smile told her a lot about him. It was a sad smile, the sort of smile smiled by a person who had seen … a lot. It seemed to Lizzie that the man had once smiled many happy smiles. However, the days of those happy smiles were done, and he’d now resigned himself to days of only sad smiles.

His hair wasn’t long, but it was unkempt, making it look longer and shaggier than it was, and that added to a rather worn down appearance overall, when combined with the light stubble on his chin and the clothing he wore. He was wearing a battered pair of brown leather boots, and a rugged pair of black trousers ran down to just above his ankles. His rather antiquated frock coat ran down to his knees, and a once-white, now-dirtied shirt lay open, making way for a simple woollen scarf that now sat beside him draped over his leather satchel.

“Hello,” he said to her. 

It was a simple word, a simple greeting, that many people would say in passing. But the way he said it indicated that this was, most definitely, not in passing. Lizzie sensed that he didn’t say this to many people.

She hesitated, just for a few seconds, wondering whether this was a stupid idea, and whether she should just turn around and go back into her flat. She did an odd little should-she/shouldn’t-she dance in the middle of the road, while debating in her mind what she should do, while a strange, incomprehensible babble of syllables that were probably meant to form ‘this was a bad idea,’ spilled out of her mouth, followed by a beat of silence, and then…. 

“Erm – hi.” 

There we go. She’d greeted him. And now she could continue down the road in an awkward walk, as if she were in fact just off on a late-night stroll. Lizzie could read people through their faces, through the little twitches and changes that they made. She read his face quite clearly, and stopped.

“I saw you, sat up there,” the man gestured up to her window.

She didn’t know what to do, even now. Could she still find some awkward excuse to retreat, or should simply try to engage in some sort of conversation.  
“Oh, er, yeah. I just – I sit there sometimes. I know, it’s a bit weird but, I just –”

“No, don’t worry. The stars,” the man looked up. “I can understand why.”

“Good, right, well,” she turned to leave, praying to some deity she didn’t believe in that this painfully awkward moment would end as quickly as it had started. “I’d better be –”

“What’s your name?”

Once again, Lizzie did her weird hesitation jig in the middle of the road.

“I’m, er, Lizzie.”

“Nice to meet you, Lizzie.”

“And you?” she asked, automatically playing her role in the formalities of introduction, although having such a formal conversation in such absurd circumstances just felt unreal.

“I’m –” he paused, almost as if he’d forgotten what his name was. “I’m the Doctor.”

He paused for a moment, as if he were trying to examine his own words and extract some meaning from them. It was as if he hadn’t heard those words from anyone in a long time, let alone himself.

She couldn’t just… go. Here was a strange man called the Doctor, sitting in the open door of a blue 1950s police box…. Lizzie walked closer to him, to get a better look at what he was doing.

“What’s that?” she asked him, attempting to use some of the ‘small talk tactics’ her manager had attempted to instil in her.

“It’s a screwdriver. It used to be sonic, but now… I think I need another one.”

She paused. “But it’s-”

“Yeah,” the strange Doctor-man nodded, as if he fully understood Lizzie’s bewilderment. The device, to her, did not look remotely like a screwdriver. It was a sort of… tool, a gadget thing, with a red hoop at the end, and some wires sprawling out of the metal stick it was attached to. 

The conversation was awkward. Neither of them really knew what to talk about because both of them were avoiding the elephant in the room.

“If you’re wondering what I’m doing here, with the box…”

“Oh, er, yeah,” Lizzie said. “What are you doing here? With the, erm, box.”

“I had seen a picture of this place on a calendar. Thought it’d be nice to come here for a break.”

“They put the main town on calendars all the time,” Lizzie nodded, thinking back to all the ‘Best British Market Town’ calendars she’d seen in gift shops.

“No…,” the Doctor looked confused. “I mean this bit.”

Lizzie looked at him, a confused expression moving across her face. He was having a laugh, and it annoyed her, because there were some idiots who took every opportunity to make fun of the people who lived here in the estate.

“It was. Not joking,” the Doctor continued. “’The Universe’s Most inspirational Places.’ For the year 5327, I think.” 

This place isn’t inspirational, Lizzie thought to herself.

“Why isn’t it inspirational?” the Doctor smiled, as if he knew what she was thinking. 

It suddenly struck Lizzie, what he had said about the year of the calendar being 5327. The 54th century. Although her instincts were shouting at her that he was just having a laugh at her expense because obviously nobody could actually be from the future and have magic ‘sonic screwdrivers’ or whatever they were! On the other hand, there was something that told her he couldn’t be making this up. 

“The year 5327,” she turned to him. “Surely that’s – I mean, I don’t know, that’s not real. Unless, like-”

The Doctor looked almost surprised that she’d picked up on it so quickly.

“What are you a Doctor of?”

He looked down suddenly, as if she’d asked a question that had reminded him of something from the past, or…

“Sorry,” she backtracked. “I didn’t, erm, I didn’t mean to upset you. Are you… are you alright?”

“No, it’s my fault,” the Doctor looked back up at her, smiling again. Lizzie could tell it wasn’t a genuine smile like his smile from before. “The question, that’s all. Brings back memories.”

“I’m sorry.” And she was.

“No, it’s not your fault. Friends of mine – they always ask that question. Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” the Doctor put the sonic screwdriver in his bag and stood up.

Lizzie caught sight of his eyes. His friends, whoever they were, weren’t with him anymore. That would explain why he looked so sad.

“Do you want to talk about it? Cause, I mean, like, you can, if you want.”

The Doctor walked over to her, and gently placed his hand on her shoulder. “Lizzie – it was lovely meeting you.”

Although she barely knew who he was, there was part of her that still wanted to help him. “I guess – if you need to vent, you know where I am.” Lizzie turned to walk away.

She sincerely wanted him to know that, to just acknowledge that whatever he’d been through, there would always be someone for him to turn to, and to talk to. He didn’t have to suffer alone. She pulled her coat tightly around her, as she walked back to the flat.

Then, a voice.

“Lizzie. Please – stay.”

*** 

Lizzie had sat down next to the Doctor at the foot of the open door to the police box. The lights had been switched off, so she couldn’t see if there was anything else in there. But – it wasn’t like normal lights being switched off. It was like there was an absence of light there, as if the darkness had almost been put there artificially so she couldn’t see whatever was inside.

“So – I was a bit aimless,” the Doctor admitted. “But I picked up a high concentration of dimensional disturbances, somewhere within this town…. at least.”

Although Lizzie didn’t have a clue what he was saying, she knew it was good that he was talking about something he was interested in, at least. It would help him.

“Unusual amounts of dimensional energy. I’ve been tracking it, and I told the TARDIS to track it ….”

She had no idea what this tardis thing was, or if it had something to do with the sonic screwdriver or the box or something else. Lizzie was just willing to let him talk.

“…And it brought you here?” she finished his sentence.

“Yes. It’s not always precise, but it usually gets the rough location reasonably correct. That’s when I discovered my sonic screwdriver was broken.”

The TARDIS clearly had nothing to do with the sonic screwdriver, then. Lizzie decided just to broach the subject anyway. It couldn’t do much harm.

“What’s the tardis?”

“Oh,” he brushed it off, as if the answer were obvious. “The box. It’s magic.”

“The magic box,” Lizzie whispered to herself.

The Doctor patted the wood, as if it were a loyal and faithful hound. “The magic box.”

He looked at it sadly, as if the words woke something up deep inside him.

“What happens, then?” she asked, referring back to the Doctor’s concern about the unusual amount of “dimensional energy” that he had tracked here. 

“It’s not that harmful, in small doses. In the grand scheme of things, the amount here is still tiny – just large in comparison to the usual state of affairs here. I’m just intrigued.”

Lizzie nodded – and then caught sight of the thing at the end of the road.

“Erm –”

“Yes?”

Lizzie gestured towards a tall figure, dressed simply, in a pair of tracksuit bottoms, and a tee-shirt picked up at a metal concert of some kind. She did, in fact, recognise him as a man who lived on the estate, just down the road from her. She had passed him sometimes, as he leaned against the wall outside his house, smoking. But what she saw before her now, chilled her to the bone.

It first struck her, that his feet were bare. That would not seem so odd on its own, but he was also wearing a mask. Something simple, with the basic features of the face shaped into white plastic. What was disturbing was that the eyeholes were empty. Or rather, where two eyes should look through and bring life to an otherwise cold and blank template, there were two deep pools of blackness. Lizzie could see this clearly, even from a distance. And for a moment, she froze.

As she always told herself, eyes were a good way to understand a person – and she knew that whoever this person was, they were not just someone she vaguely recognized, standing in the middle of the road wearing a mask. That would be absurd anyway – even if that’s all it were. 

But this was something outside of the norm.

Lizzie wondered whether it was a coincidence that some of the weirdest stuff she’d encountered in her life so far was occurring on this one evening. She decided it wasn’t a coincidence, because the Doctor seemed to have some idea of what was going on; he had tracked some odd disturbances to her very neighbourhood and now the Doctor was rushing on foot towards the masked figure, perhaps to take a closer look?

And Lizzie followed.

The figure didn’t react, even when the Doctor went right up close and stared into its face. It remained motionless, staring off into the distance with empty eyes.  
“I hope he’s alright,” Lizzie murmured, a nervous look on her face.

“Do you…?” the Doctor started to ask and then stopped, as if he expected her to know what he was about to ask, which she did

“He lives just down the road… I pass him on the way to work.”

“Ah,” the Doctor murmured, as he tried to pull the mask from the face. Lizzie heard the crackle of electricity and the Doctor whipped his fingers back.

“Don’t hurt him,” Lizzie gasped.

“I’m fine,” the Doctor responded, shrugging it off.

“I was talking to you. Be careful. Whoever he is, he is like… you know. A person.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

In a way, Lizzie felt a little bit guilty, because the Doctor looked disappointed with himself. 

“It’s stuck,” he continued, “I mean, there’s an electrical field bonding the mask to his skin. I don’t know what it’s for…”

“Why him?” Lizzie asked, interested as to why, of all the people, this had happened to this man, on this estate, although to be honest, it didn’t completely surprise her. 

“I… don’t know.”

The Doctor placed his fingers just where the mask touched the skin.

“What are –”

This time, he gave a firm yank, and this time he lurched back as the electricity shot up through his hands and straight up both his arms.

“Be care…” And, as he reeled from the pain… “Doctor!”

One more go, one more searing shock of electricity, and the mask was in the Doctor’s hands, along with the face of the man that had been beneath it.

There wasn’t any blood or gore, though. Instead, the face looked like it had been stitched together. His mouth, nostrils, eyelids and earholes were bound tightly together with thin, white thread. The operation had been executed with expertise – all the stitches were perfectly even, and a knot had been tied at the end. 

Lizzie grimaced and spoke softly. “Poor, poor guy.”

The Doctor frowned. “The mask – it bonded to his face so securely that it intruded so much on the facial structure that… the mask…repaired it.”

Lizzie understood what he meant, though the Doctor, almost as if for dramatic effect, decided to elaborate anyway.

“When it became attached to his face, it damaged his eyes, and nose, and mouth. So … to fix that the mask stitched them up, like a doctor stitches up a wound.”

The man who’d worn the mask remained standing, as the Doctor made his way back to the TARDIS.

“What do we do with him?” Lizzie placed an arm around the man, just to make sure he didn’t fall over. 

“We take him back to wherever he lived. Then – eventually his body will be found.”

Lizzie turned towards the house where the man had once lived, his body leaning on her, as if he had just sprained his ankle, or bruised his shin badly, and she were helping him back home.

“Lizzie –”

“It’s fine, Doctor. I’ll take him home.”

***

As Lizzie walked, supporting him, her mind went into overdrive. This man was dead. 

The Doctor had said the mask had helped him, it would’ve been more painful had it not stitched him up like that. But someone was dead, and in what was both a simple and extraordinary fashion. This man had loved people, people had loved him. A whole life. And she hadn’t even known his name. His body was heavy, really too heavy for her. She should’ve let the Doctor help, but she was determined to do this on her own. She needed time away from him, to think about what she’d seen. When she returned, the Doctor would probably be gone, just as quickly as he’d arrived. But – the incident with the mask could not have been all there was to this. Whatever the Doctor was here for, it was not over yet. She was almost sure of it.

The Doctor was intriguing. And terrifying as well. He’d looked disturbed when it was clear the man was dead. But he had also looked at the body as if he’d seen the same thing a hundred times before. Whoever he was, he was fundamentally a sad man. She was certain he had lost someone. So many possible interpretations of him – but that’s what intrigued her even more. Was he a mad man, or a sad man, or a bad man, or maybe all three at the same time? 

The front door to the masked man’s house was unlocked, so she gently steered him inside, and through to the downstairs bedroom. With great difficulty, she managed to lie him down on the bed.

Whoever he was, he hadn’t done anything wrong. He had done nothing to deserve this. It all had happened because someone had decided it should be him.

Lizzie shut the front door behind her and headed back to where she had left the Doctor.

***

When Lizzie arrived back down the road, the blue box was still waiting. The Doctor stood outside, pacing up and down, like an eccentric and impatient professor trying to sort out what was going on and must be done.

“Ah, there you are,” the Doctor said, a hint of urgency in his voice. 

“Sorry, er…” she began.

“Lizzie, don’t worry, it’s not your fault. But I need you to come with me. Now.”

Of course, her first instinct was to run away from him as far and as fast as she could. And she very nearly did, since she still had very little idea who he was. And some men were dangerous. 

He presented the mask to her. A message was on the front, as if the mask were a screen, in simple black font.

Facial connection compromised. Defence formation transmitted.

“I’ve done a scan,” the Doctor said, his voice quick and anxious. “Pre-residual teleportation energy. But regardless of whatever the mask was, whoever owns it is on their way, here, and soon, looking for answers.”

“… and?”

“’Defence formation,’ Lizzie. That means, whenever they do arrive, they’re going to be looking for whoever detached its face. And you were there, with me.”  
Lizzie stared at him, and she saw how worried he was. He was genuinely concerned for her, and was nervously looking to his ‘TARDIS’ every few seconds, as if he were desperate to get away from whatever was coming. Whoever he was, he wanted to help. Lizzie looked at the Doctor, as he waited, just a few feet away from her, and while she looked at him, she could see the huge expanse of sky and stars behind him, like two big, black curtains, splattered in glitter, drawn across the night sky.

And she walked towards him.

The Doctor ran into the TARDIS, and Lizzie followed. But then, as she approached the wooden frame of the doors, she hesitated for a second, watching the Doctor as he disappeared into the darkness inside. It would be cramped. A very tight squeeze. But the Doctor – when he’d run inside, he’d just… kept running. As if the box had no back. 

Then the lights turned on. 

What Lizzie saw in front of her was impossible.

The box was, rather obviously, bigger on the inside. She poked her head back outside again, just to make sure that she definitely wasn’t imagining it or that she hadn’t fallen asleep in front of the telly, or something equally stupid. Strangely, though, she knew for certain that she wasn’t dreaming.

It was real. The bigger-on-the-inside box was real. 

The chamber was huge, and gleaming white, but full of character too. It was hexagonal in shape, just like the shape of the quirky console in the middle, which was completely covered in all manner of buttons and switches and levers. The ceiling was made almost entirely of glass, but the view was not that of the sky outside. Instead, it was some other sky, with ecstatic swirling clouds of shimmering dust, an explosion of colours from all ends of the spectrum, with shining beads of golden light bursting through it all. It was a view of something so far off, and yet so close.

For a brief moment, Lizzie stood in the doorway, unsure of where to go and what to do, but the Doctor firmly hurried her in. As she stepped inside, she saw that two of the walls were lined with bookshelves crammed full of books of all kinds. As she walked past them, she recognised some of the titles, but others, she had never set her eyes upon before. Their titles spoke of the future; many were novels that, for her, had not yet been written, even though they sat there, in front of her, looking as old as the battered books that one often found in second-hand bookshops. 

Beside the console was a lone armchair. The Doctor, whoever he was, clearly travelled and even lived here alone, although, partially hidden away on a bookshelf, was a black and white photograph of a woman, wearing something that looked like a make-do bridal gown. It was small photo, just a bit smaller than A5 size, but in a golden frame. Lizzie glanced at it as she walked past, her mind desperate to know who she was to the Doctor, and who else had come to know him.   
There was a viewing gallery above, and just down a set of steps, was an open area where an old, antique writing table stood in the corner, covered in papers. There was a bar as well; Lizzie didn’t dare go in, but as she walked past the entrance, it looked like the bar was quite literally gathering dust. It hadn’t been used for ages. 

The Doctor was looking at her, as if he knew that she would have some questions for him to answer; it was almost as if he expected it – as if she were in a position experienced by so many before her, and he was just following the script. 

“We must be somewhere else,” Lizzie said as she looked up at the galaxies above her..

The Doctor smiled. He looked tired, but happy, as if he were almost pleased about something.

“Why do you think that?” the Doctor replied as he flicked some switches on the console and pulled a lever. 

“Er… I guess, well … it was definitely wardrobe-sized on the outside. And then I came inside and it wasn’t. So… we must be somewhere else that isn’t within the four walls of the wooden blue bit…” 

“And…the ceiling kind of also gives it away,” she added, softly, almost as an afterthought.

“Yes. Basically. It’s another dimension.”

There was a screen attached to an articulated metal armature, mounted on a turntable on top of the console, and the Doctor grabbed it, and gracefully, slid it towards him.

“We have to get away from them.”

“I guess this thing, your… TARDIS… it moves?” Lizzie stood, motionless, and slightly awkwardly, looking at the Doctor as he danced around the console. And, the way he moved was like he was doing it all again for the very first time. And yes, she was aware of the paradox at the heart of her observation.

“Oh, Lizzie,” the Doctor seemed to be smiling at her naivety, even though pretty much everyone on Earth would’ve been naïve in her situation. “It moves.”  
With those words, he pulled down the lever with one emphatic move – the largest lever, the one in the middle of the console. And clearly it was the ON switch– the one that made the magic begin, the one that made the great machine burst into life.

She was right – as the Doctor’s hand left the lever, the glass column in the middle started to slide up and down, and a great, mechanical whirring, like the sound a machine would make if somehow it could breathe, echoed throughout the box.

Seconds later, the box stopped.

Lizzie was aware of how quick it had been. Most spaceships had to do the whole launching thing, and then had to fly, but it was as if the box had picked itself up, and had moved itself to wherever they were now, without any mechanical fuss. 

In the blink of an eye, the Doctor was past her, looking out the doors, peering from side to side.

“It’s safe. They haven’t followed us.”

He stepped out the door and beckoned for her to follow. She did. 

“Why here?” Lizzie asked.

“Set the coordinates to random, somewhere within the vicinity of the town.”

Lizzie had a startling sensation: it was as if the TARDIS had known she was in here, and Lizzie began to wonder whether the bigger-on-the-inside box could sense things, like a real, thinking person, as if the computer in the middle was the brain and the control centre of the whole thing. 

“I need to find the source of this mask.” The Doctor’s words abruptly brought her out of her thoughts.

Lizzie looked at him, her expression asking him to elaborate, as he held the sonic screwdriver to the mask.

“This isn’t the only mask or even the main mask.”

His observation had not helped. She waited for more to come, and it did.

“Imagine a nervous system of masks,” he continued.

It almost made Lizzie laugh, as it was such a ridiculous notion.

“And this is just one of the nerves at the end, one of the little, tiny ones. Somewhere, there is a brain. The one that controls all the rest.”

“Oh. And you want to find it? Or … something else…”

“Exactly. I quite fancy a cup of tea,” the Doctor had made his way over to the door of a café. He was about to use the sonic screwdriver (a device that Lizzie seemed to note had featured quite heavily in their encounter so far) to open the door. Then, Lizzie reached into her coat pocket, and pulled out a set of keys.

“Where did you get those?” the Doctor looked at her in surprise.

“My manager.”

There was a look of realisation on his face. “You…”

But before he could finish, she had entered the café.


	3. Half the World Away (part 3)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now that Lizzie and the mysterious Doctor have met, they get to know each other as they begin to solve the mystery haunting the village of Dunsworth...
> 
> Thank you so much to anyone taking the time to read this. Hope you enjoy this chapter :D

It would come as no surprise to anyone, except perhaps the Doctor, that there was no one in the café at that time of night. It was gone half past two, after all, as she put the key in the lock and the Doctor followed her inside the empty shop and turned on the lights. Lizzie began to think of what it would be like the next morning if her manager found out. That is, if there ever was a next morning. 

Lizzie had truly mastered the art of the perfect cup of tea – not only because she spent so much of her personal time drinking it, but because it’s what she spent so many of her work days, making it for others.

“You work here,” the Doctor distractedly stated the obvious as he looked up from the mask when she placed the mug down on the little table in front of him and sat down across from him. 

“Yes.”

“That’s… a surprise.”

“I guess I’ll take that as a compliment,” she laughed nervously.

“It was meant as one. But you’re intelligent. Very intelligent. Why are you here? Living in that council flat, and working in a café making tea for the locals over 70 and for tourists passing through?”

Passing through. Like you? She smiled to herself.

She realised that the Doctor probably lived in his magic box. That it was like a home on wheels, perhaps like a caravan. He was obviously from somewhere, wherever that was, but for some reason, stayed away from it. Lizzie noticed the contrast between the two of them, especially since here she sat, stuck in the town she’d lived in since childhood. 

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go ….” Lizzie responded finally, and then stopped, as if she’d revealed too much.

“Go on.”

“This town is home, I suppose. And I also don’t really have much of a choice.”

“I noticed. The estate, and then this part of the town. The divide between both halves. Not even halves – the estate is sprawling, with this island of the upper class in the middle.”

Lizzie noticed the Doctor as he said this: he’d looked away from her and then down into his mug of tea. He was trying to hide his face.

“Are you…?” she began.

“Sorry. Don’t worry. I – I knew someone from your country who was meant to fix all this.”

Lizzie didn’t understand what he meant, because he sounded so certain that somebody had been going to help them.

“His vision for the country. No more poverty, or gaping inequality, or anything like that. No university tuition fees. Social care, so much better.”

Lizzie would’ve voted for him, whoever he was.

“I don’t even know your last name,” the Doctor said to her.

“I don’t even know your first,” she snapped back, rather pleased with her witty retort. “Sorry, not that I…”

But the Doctor was smiling, almost as if he were pleased with her. 

“Darwin,” Lizzie said.

“As in Charles?”

“As in Charles,” she confirmed.

“I met him once. Interesting chap, to say the least.”

There was probably some kind of ‘oh my god!’ comment that Lizzie should’ve used to respond to whatever the Doctor said, but she decided just to take it as it came, because the oddness showed very little sign of stopping.

“Elizabeth Darwin,” the Doctor said, letting the name flow off his tongue. “It’s a lovely name.”

She hesitated. She’d never liked anyone to call her by her full name. It reminded her of the scary care-worker from the home, back when she was younger, who used the name like a threat or a warning. With the look on her face, she told the Doctor all he needed to know and he understood. But then she added, “Thanks, I guess-”

The Doctor, so far, had spent the entire conversation looking at her, almost like the way she chose to focus on a person’s eyes. The Doctor had been focusing on her – on everything about her. She saw something else, just for the briefest of seconds, as his eyes flicked away from her to something else.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing,” the Doctor dismissed it, sipping his tea and trying not to look sheepish that he’d been caught out. Lizzie thought about ignoring it, but it was as if, for just a few seconds, he’d fallen out of their conversation.

“Like, I don’t want to be weird or anything, but you were definitely – you were definitely looking behind me.”

“Lizzie, wait – ”

She’d got him.

“What is it?” she asked. 

“Don’t turn around. Just – look into my eyes, Elizabeth.”

“How far away is it?”

“Approximately 10 metres, give or take.”

“Erm...” 

“I’ve been scanning the mask – I think I know what it is. And this is what they do. It’s better when they take their victims by surprise, so they have no idea. Or, even better, they like to put you slightly on edge, like sowing the seeds of the bad dreams of a child lying awake in bed at night...”

The Doctor’s analogy chilled her to the bone – and he continued.

“That’s what they are, Lizzie. They are the shiver that runs down your spine. Maybe the sound of a few footsteps, here and there. Just to make you slightly wary, setting your blood to a gentle boil. Then they pounce.”

“But…,” Lizzie tried hard to think of some explanation, as if her life depended on it. Which, she just realised, it kind of actually did. “But, surely, if you’re telling me it’s there, then – then there’s no point in it killing me! Because … because if I’m aware of their existence, then there would be no point – no – no shock factor.”

“In theory,” the Doctor said. “But I’ve come to realise that theory and practise are very different things.”

Lizzie was taking slow, deep breaths, as the fear bubbled up through her, rising up her gullet and clawing its way up her throat.

“Can we get away from it?” she whispered. “I mean – this is just a drone, or something – what about the main it?”

 

The Doctor stuffed the sonic screwdriver and the mask into his satchel. “Okay. Lizzie, stand up.”

Lizzie pushed her chair away from her as she stood. By speaking in his slow, calm, voice, the Doctor was almost hypnotizing her into rising slower.  
“Slowly, that’s it,” the Doctor smiled. “Keep looking at me – that’s it, keep looking – Lizzie, don’t look.”

She turned her head, but only an inch. She could see the shadow, where the creature lurked. She could see the outline of its mask, and the blurred, yet dark, and empty pits, where its eyes were watching her. Those eyes must’ve been the only way it sensed. Everything it was registering – her movements, the movements of the Doctor in front of her, would be streaming through the blackness of those eyes.

Lizzie was up now, and the Doctor was looking over her shoulder at the masked figure.

“Now, Lizzie … step around the table, and walk.”

She did so, and started slowly walking away. Gradually, as she got further and further away from the table and hopefully the figure she could not see, she began to speed up.

“Don’t speed up. Just … stay … calm.”

The Doctor’s words made her slow down again, made her breathe. She was frozen in the moment, but unlike the masked man, she didn’t sense everything through her eyes. She could feel the coldness of the café on her arms underneath her coat, causing the hairs on her arms to rise, and she could hear only one sound – the Doctor’s soothing voice.

She was near the door.

“Now … go outside,” the Doctor continued. She began to leave, as he said, but when she started to turn around to look back into the café, the Doctor firmly warned her, again, “Don’t.”

He strode past her, out the café door, and a few feet later, was at the doors of the TARDIS, unlocking them and stepping back inside as Lizzie followed.   
Almost as soon as she’d shut the TARDIS doors, she heard the sound of a hard object slamming against the wooden doors. It was like somebody had a battering ram, and was pounding the navy blue oak as hard as they could. 

The Doctor was looking at the monitor – its screen showed a view of the street outside. But … there was no battering-ram, just the masked figure thumping the doors with its fists. 

“It won’t be able to get in. Nothing can get through those doors,” assured the Doctor saw her standing tentatively by the doors, watching them fearfully.  
“’Nothing’ only extends to what they’ve been tested against,” she said, not taking her eyes off them for a second. 

“Good point,” he walked over to her. “But, we’re leaving anyway. It won’t be able to come after us.”

“You said that before.”

“This time we’re going further afield.” 

Lizzie began to protest. “You … I need to … I have to work tomorrow.”

The Doctor smiled a coy smile. Lizzie was beginning to realise he had rather a knack for surprises. So, as he had done before, he pulled the lever and the TARDIS started its husky, mechanical breathing once more. She shrugged at his impudence, and then wished she hadn’t because she was worried she’d offended him.

“Lizzie, open the doors.” the Doctor flung his satchel over his shoulder and joined her by the doors. “Trust me,” he pointed to the handle. 

“But it’s still out there,” she said, and yet she had walked back to them and joined him, apparently trusting him enough to go against what her instincts were telling her. 

She opened the doors.

It was daytime now. And yet they were in exactly the same place, in front of the café. She remembered Charles Darwin.

“So it – it travels in time as well?”

The Doctor’s face lit up as she said it and as he watched her realization that she had been in a time machine. 

“Yes. It travels in time. And that should shake them off for a bit.”

“Erm – yeah, I guess. But,” she asked, as he reached inside his satchel, and took out a strange, mobile phone sized device. “Surely we need to look for the brain? You know? The one in the middle that controls all the rest? Or, I don’t know…”

“Yes – we do. I’m trying to lock onto a trace of the dimensional energy. That’s how they travel, I think. Bending dimensions.”

“So… what are they?”

“Hmm?” the Doctor asked.

“You said you knew.”

“Oh. No, don’t worry….”

“You can’t just tell me, and then not tell me. That’s not fair. I am part of this. Sorry, I don’t want to be a….”

There was a brief, awkward silence between the two of them, as they stood in the glinting, golden sunlight of the morning. They were on the edge of the town square: a memorial wall stood in the centre, like an island in a sea of perfectly trimmed grass, the green protected by a ring of ornamental, black metal, chains. 

The Doctor looked at her, as if he were confused about something. As if nobody had spoken to him like that in a while. His eyes were kind, though, as if he appreciated her for having said it.

“Of course. I’m sorry,” he said. 

The two of them walked down the cobbled pavement, beneath the lamp posts with their perfect hanging baskets, full of flowers of all kinds and colours. Lizzie checked her watch – it was wrong. It was as if she’d just walked straight out of her own time and through an open door into another. A few people were out and about – but it was quiet, and there weren’t as many tourists as usual. Just the odd villager walking their dog, or a young family out for a morning walk.

“I picked a Sunday,” the Doctor noticed her looking. She wondered why.

“There’s an old myth, Lizzie – It was a bedtime story, for me – about the mask.“ the Doctor began. “It was a story they used to tell children, back home. It involved a spectre, a ghostly figure all robed in white, with a mask, like the ones we’ve just seen. They called her the Masked Maiden. And supposedly, she’d come at night, find children, and stitch their eyes shut, so they’d never be able to see again.”

Lizzie grimaced, before realising it was really no worse than most fairy stories she had heard. 

“I didn’t realise it at first,” the Doctor admitted. “I thought about the similarity – but dismissed it….”

“Because you don’t believe in fairy tales?”

Lizzie wished she could take back her words and wipe them from his mind, because they’d both stopped walking, and it was probably too sudden, too personal, too sentimental an observation. But in those few moments, something the Doctor had said – she wasn’t even sure what it was – had struck a chord in her, and made her say it, even though she hadn’t even thought it through.

“Sorry, I should just – like, not speak , or…”  
r blunt observation rather than her awkward apology for it. Lizzie nodded, a sort of awkward nod, because she didn’t really know what to say. 

Still beside her, the Doctor was intently reading something—dimensional energy? – with his sonic held aloft, and humming busily.

“Where are you tracking it to?”

“I’m not sure. What landmarks are in this place?”

There wasn’t anything significant Lizzie could think of. It was just a little market town, where old people came to live out their final years, and where tourists flocked to in search of the finest middle-class experience. 

“Anything you’d find on a map would do,” the Doctor said. 

“Erm… there’s a pub, a post office, a church,” Lizzie saw the Doctor grimace slightly at the mention of a church. “A gift shop – actually there are lots of those… And….”

“Ah, hello Elizabeth!”

Lizzie stopped her list when she saw Mrs Smith walking towards her.

“Good morning Mrs Smith!” Lizzie exclaimed a touch too cheerfully, straightening her coat and striding towards the lady with her two springer spaniels (Peter and Jasper, ages 5 and 6, respectively, Peter having recently suffered from worms) The Doctor was left looking around in confusion, as the shy and bumbling girl beside him had suddenly transformed into somebody else. 

“Who’s your friend?” Mrs Smith gave a wry smile as the Doctor approached them. 

“This is…,” Lizzie realised she couldn’t introduce him as a doctor without Mrs Smith reaffirming her suspicions that everyone from the estate was delusional. Speaking of which, Lizzie was expecting some kind of mocking comment right about –

“Another one from the estate, hmm?” Mrs Smith looked down at him. “I’ve not seen you around here before.”

“No. I’m –”

Mrs Smith turned to Lizzie. “He’s not an– ,” she mouthed something at her.

“No, Mrs Smith. The Doctor is not an immigrant.”

The Doctor looked at Mrs Smith in disgust.

“And, Mrs Smith,” Lizzie continued. “Would you mind not using such language– ”

“What are you looking at me like that for?” Mrs Smith frowned at the Doctor. “Honestly. My husband served our health service for a good few years. They ought to charge foreigners– ”

“Mrs Smith,” Lizzie interrupted, her voice fierce in a way that surprised even Lizzie herself. “Your husband served a health service that promises free healthcare to everyone. Including immigrants. And also including bigots. Good morning.”

And Lizzie walked away.

Mrs Smith had a lot of power in this small town, so it didn’t matter how much Lizzie could travel in time or how easily she could run away, she was probably out of a job. But it had been worth it, just to see Mrs Smith’s shocked expression as she’d turned and walked off. It was heart-warming to know that if they did cut off the heating in Lizzie’s flat she’d still have the memory of Mrs Smith’s face to treasure always! 

“Where did that come from?” the Doctor whispered in awe as he appeared behind her. 

“Erm ... what?” Lizzie asked, as if she had no idea what he was talking about. She did, of course, but she’d decided she’d like them both to forget about it and move on.

“All of it! First you were all small-talk and smiles, and then you completely ripped into her. I’ve – I’ve not seen that side of you before.”

Lizzie turned to him. “They’re – I mean, they – well, they’re not sides of me. I mean the scary one, yeah, that one is, but like – I don’t want to be horrible ‘cause she has children and stuff, but she deserves it and I really hate her. And the smiley one, I have to treat her like that in the café, and it genuinely makes me feel sick. So yeah.”

The Doctor looked impressed, and Lizzie still felt uncomfortable.

“It’s like acting,” Lizzie continued, then shut up. She thought about saying something else, but didn’t. Then she did. “That two-sided person, is not me. Like an actress, I can become them, and talk about the weather, and dogs, and other things like that, but it’s a performance.”

The Doctor seemed to understand. She hoped he did. Lizzie was concerned that the Doctor would expect to see more of the not-real waitress personality, which wasn’t her, at all. Lizzie had found it hard at first, finding the confidence to make small talk with people. But it had come down to the wire – she needed the job, and so she had to learn. And when she finally developed a way of making it like pretending to be a different character, an alter-ego of sorts, it had made it so much easier. She was just playing the role of a happy, confident and outgoing young woman, while knowing, all the time, that she wasn’t. She still got shaky whenever she had to make phone calls to people. 

Suddenly she realised the Doctor’s face had changed from kind and understanding to shocked. He was looking down the road, where a masked figure stood. It was an old woman, who looked like she’d just come out of her house.

Lizzie turned and looked behind herself: at the far end of the road, there was another – an old man, out to collect his morning paper. There were only two of them, though. They could get away from two of them – probably. Then she looked across to the other side of the square: access to the streets on that side were blocked by two more, and standing at the head of the path to the church that also led down to the square, was the vicar, wearing a mask the same white shade as his robes. 

The Doctor strode over to the old lady. She was at least a foot shorter than him, her hair permed, and she still wore her slippers, along with a thin red cardigan. A cup of tea was clutched in her hand. It looked almost comically normal – as if she were offering him a morning cuppa.

“I know who you are,” the Doctor said.

The masked figure did not respond. 

“’The Masked Maiden’. A figure of Gallifreyan legend, a bedtime story. You were used to terrify me.”

Lizzie watched as the Doctor tried to… what? Intimidate the woman. 

“What are you doing here?” he asked.. 

Still no response. 

“There’s nothing for you here.”

“Ask it why does it choose those people,” Lizzie nudged the Doctor. 

The masked woman turned to her. A message typed itself out onto the face of the mask, like text being entered into a word document.

These people are disposable. 

Lizzie wanted to break something, preferably the mask. “Nobody’s disposable,” she answered firmly. “There’s no such thing as– ”

The Maiden is looking for the prize.

“You’ll have to talk to it,” the Doctor urged Lizzie. But she backed away, because she just couldn’t do it, she was sure of it. There was no way at all she could talk to aliens about all this stuff she didn’t understand. 

“I – I –”

“You can, Lizzie! You just told that old bat Mrs. Smith where to stick it! You can do the same now.”

Lizzie sighed, like the audible ‘fine’ of a sulking teenager. 

“What do I say?”

“The questions have to come from you.”

Lizzie scanned her brain as to what questions would be relevant to ask this creature. Where was it from? No. The Doctor wouldn’t need to know that anyway. Were they invading? No. Stupid. Jumping to conclusions. Then she remembered the last thing the old woman had said. Or rather, typed. Or whatever. 

“What is the prize?”

Unauthorised information for drone 5:1467835. 

Suddenly, Lizzie thought of an even better question, and was rather pleased with herself.

“Why are you only answering my questions?”

You are authorised.

In her brain, she ran through what she’d just learned. For some reason, she was authorised to talk to this drone. But the Doctor wasn’t. Maybe the Doctor was alien – it was possible – no, it was probable, with a box like that – and perhaps, as a human, she had special authorisation? 

“Well … clearly … they like authorising people. Including their human drones,” Lizzie said. “And – for some reason, I’m authorised for certain information that the drone isn’t, which I guess means that the Maiden keeps some information exclusively to herself – maybe so it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands? Or, am I just reading too much into this?”

“No,” the Doctor gave her a reassuring look. “I think you might be right.”

“I guess the Maiden herself,” Lizzie began, spooked at what she was saying because it sounded too fictional to her liking, “is probably where the prize is? Whatever that is...”

“Yes – I believe you’re right there as well. Think, Lizzie, think. When I asked you for locations – what other landmarks are there? In fact – even better– think of locations in relation to you. Places that relate to you and to people you know. Because you have authorisation, for some reason.”

Lizzie thought, thought, and thought. There was the café, but the masked figures had already been there, and found nothing. There was a school, but she didn’t see what they’d be able to find there either. Then again – they were probably looking for something obscure. There was her former home, obviously, but –  
Oh. 

“Erm … Doctor, a question for you, I think?”

The Doctor was eyeing the area around them. The TARDIS was still in reach. 

“No,” Lizzie dismissed it. “No. Don’t worry. Stupid idea –”

“Elizabeth Darwin, listen to me. Your ideas aren’t stupid.”

Lizzie breathed, and continued. “I – I grew up in a care home, long story. Well, not really that long but… anyway … you did say it was a fairy story, used to scare small children. Well –”

The Doctor stared at her, suddenly realizing what she was saying. Lizzie saw his look – it was the look of somebody putting the pieces of the puzzle together, and beginning to understand what they meant. 

“Lizzie,” the Doctor said, still looking at the figures out of the corner of one eye. The one word that would describe the look on his face was “ominous,” as if he were about to say something really big or really important. He kept her in suspense, for a beat, as he watched the creatures in silence. They were beginning to advance now, one by one, slowly making their way towards them. Lizzie hoped he’d just hurry up and finish whatever he was going to say because second by second she was growing ever more concerned for her life... and his.

“On three, we run …”


	4. Half the World Away (part 4)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is time for Lizzie and the Doctor to face the creature haunting that little English town. Then, they find time to look up to the stars and dream of the universe above their heads...
> 
> Hope you enjoy this chapter and thanks for reading ^_^

The care home had not changed much over the years, apart from the fact most of the people there were different. The older residents now had been the youngest during Lizzie’s time. But as she had done, they too had grown up, and yet there they were still here.

Pat opened the door and looked out as the two of them approached on foot – they thought it best to park the TARDIS outside and at a distance instead of just popping up, despite the urgency of their visit. Lizzie looked at the outside. She wondered if people looked at the houses of their parents the way she looked at the front of this home. She thought probably not.

It was sad, for the reason that things are just sad when they’re over. People are automatically entitled to feel sad about things from their childhood, because the things and moment from happier times aren’t around anymore. They had been good to her – really good to her. But there were still the emotions that kids in care went through, that it was almost impossible to protect kids from. But the four walls ahead of her had protected her when she needed it, even though sometimes the home itself was the reason she needed protecting.

Although she frequently passed it, she was looking at it close up now, for the first time in years, and getting ready to go in for the first time in years. She took a deep breath, and followed the Doctor. 

Pat, the guy who opened the door, had taken over as head care worker when she was 15, and had been there throughout her last few years at the place. He was a broad-shouldered Irishman, with a heart of gold. He was, to be fair, one of the kindest people she’d ever met. 

“Lizzie,” he seemed shocked at her suddenly turning up. It probably was a bit of a shock, considering she hadn’t been back in so long. 

“Hey, Pat,” she smiled warmly. 

“Come in! Who’s this?” he asked, as he shut the door behind them. A staircase ran up beside the door – Lizzie looked at it, and remembered the days when, as a six or seven-year-old, she’d want to be taller, and would try as hard as possible to get up those stairs two at a time, hoping it would increase her height.   
“Oh,” the Doctor gave one of his mysterious smiles. “I’m an inspector,” the Doctor flashed a strange, blank bit of paper. But Pat clearly bought it – because he seemed to believe him. He’s also very immoral, Lizzie wanted to say, as she saw that Doctor was clearly faking his credentials with a magic bit of paper. She couldn’t believe that she was letting a weird spaceman into this care home, but because he was presenting himself as an ‘inspector’, Pat would stay with him, so she felt reassured.

“Listen, Lizzie – sorry about this,” Pat said to her. “I’ll deal with the inspector. Ah – Carmen.”

A girl walked down the stairs – she looked like she was about 16, and she had somehow managed the remarkable art of being able to traverse stairs and look at a mobile’s screen at the same time. 

“Yeah,” Carmen said as she didn’t look up.

“Go and make Lizzie some tea, would you?”

Then, Carmen did look up, and saw Lizzie standing there. “Oh my god! Lizzie! Heeey!” she almost ran up to her, and the two of them hugged. Carmen had only been about… 11, the last time they’d seen each other. The little girl Lizzie had left behind had become a young woman. How things changed.

“Oh, Pat,” Carmen said, as Lizzie followed her into the kitchen. “I have some forms for you to sign, or… something.”

***

After Carmen had made Lizzie her tea, they’d sat around the table in the kitchen (which was not meant to be a place where one ate or drank, unless special permission had been given). At one point, a few kids passed her - some she recognised, some she didn’t. The ones that recognised her said hi. She suddenly realised, that she was missed. 

The conversation went as many of Lizzie’s conversations did. She was worried she’d be a little too honest about her situation, because she didn’t want to scare Carmen about the world, and was worried that by telling her about her own situation, she’d make her extremely anxious. But she couldn’t lie to her – and perhaps Carmen had her head screwed on a little better than Lizzie. 

“That guy,” Carmen obviously meant the Doctor. “He’s not really an inspector, is he?”

Lizzie hesitated. She didn’t actually know. 

“Lizzie. He’s not – oh my god, he’s not a paedo-” 

“Look,” Lizzie hushed her. “Something… I don’t know… something weird is going on.”

As Lizzie told her story, Carmen looked increasingly sickened by what she was hearing. And then, Lizzie realised that Carmen was crying, and she felt really guilty because she had wanted more than anything else to avoid upsetting her. 

“I – I’m really sorry,” Lizzie said. “I – I didn’t mean to– ”

Carmen looked up at Lizzie, wiping tears from her eyes. “You haven’t heard, have you?”

Carmen told Lizzie her story: there was a kid from the home who’d been found dead a few weeks ago, with a mask on his face. And when Pat had prised it off, they’d found exactly what Lizzie had just described to Carmen: his eyes, ears, mouth and nostrils had all been sewn shut. Lizzie felt terrible for her, especially about how she’d had to face that actually happening, in reality, at only 16.

“Pat tried to keep it as quiet as possible,” Carmen shrugged. “But a few of us found out, and he made us swear that we wouldn’t tell any of the younger kids. Obviously, they know the kid died – but they don’t know… you know… how he was found.”

Lizzie could not believe that something she’d become mixed up in, already had led to something so terrible for the children of the home she’d grown up in. And yet somehow, the Doctor remained mostly unfazed. Why go to the children first? After all, if that’d happened weeks ago, before anything like it had happened in the rest of the town, why would the creatures go for the innocent before anyone else? 

“Carmen – I don’t – I mean, I don’t really know much about the Doctor. Not much at all. But I believe he knows what he’s talking about, mostly. And I think he genuinely wants to help here.”

“How did you even meet him?” Carmen asked.

“He just sort of… turned up, over there, on the street corner.”

*** 

Lizzie knocked on the door to Pat’s office, and heard his deep Irish voice call out “Come in!” She did so, leaving the door open, as a matter of long-ingrained habit. As she entered, Pat was there, talking to the Doctor.

She didn’t want to get him embroiled in all this. It wasn’t fair on him – he was already dealing with the death of one. For someone so nice, who had treated her well, and so many others well, he didn’t deserve being involved in this horrific matter any further. “Pat, can you leave us quickly?”

“But, why – ?” Pat looked between the two of them.

“Please,” she said, a more insistent this time. Pat did as he was asked.

“There was…” Lizzie gulped, as she tried to tell the Doctor what she had learned from Carmen. She didn’t think she could continue. But she did. “There was a child, and the mask did its thing, and– ”

“I know. Pat told me,” the Doctor said, his face grim. Lizzie could see he was just as disgusted as her – but he did a better job at hiding it. Perhaps too well? “It’s here, Lizzie. You were right. The Maiden is here, somewhere.”

“But – Doctor,” she began. “A child is dead.”

“I know. And I’m going to do everything in my power to stop the Maiden from killing again, doing whatever it is she’s doing, because– ”

“It’s just – like – I don’t think it’s fair, that she’s focusing on children,” she said. 

“No. It isn’t.”

“And you’re kind of… you seem…. pretty relaxed about it all. Just because the child was from a care home, it doesn’t mean he wasn’t loved. He was, a lot, so don’t just treat it like another casualty, like you’ve treated everyone else so far. It’s been a bit like – “oh no, there’s another one.” And you’ve not shown much understanding that these are people who have their own lives. Apart from the boy. He was meant to have a life – and now he won’t. And, I think that’s …”

The Doctor sat on top of the desk, in silence, looking at his feet, ashamed.

“You care,” he said.

She held herself back from stating the obvious, like he’d just done. Of course she cared. People were precious; they didn’t come along often. But all of this came out rather awkwardly when she finally spoke, “Erm, yeah. Like. Quite a bit.”

The Doctor looked at her and smiled. “Thank you.”

She didn’t really know what he was thanking her for – was it just one of those ambiguous thank yous that people say when they’ve finally understood something that was confusing them before? Or, was it from the heart, stated awkwardly, and incompletely, like she had just done? 

“Thank you, so mu-”

But the Doctor’s words stopped with the scream that came from outside. 

***

Loads of kids were standing at the French windows, looking out into the garden.

It was a huge garden – a heaven for children, an immense playground for their imagination. Lizzie had memories of walking around this very garden when she was really small, wearing little red welly boots, and a bright yellow mackintosh that was just a little bit too big. Sometimes the bottom part of the garden got really muddy, and became swamp-like, and it had to be closed off. But Lizzie used to duck under the safety tape that they’d put around it, and walk out into the bog, and just to walk around in it, enjoying the feel of the soft, squishy mud through the protective layer of bright red rubber.

And she thought of how, years later, when in the dog days of summer, she would sit out on the patio, reading while she watched the younger children just… enjoying themselves, without a care, and she wished that she could be like that again. It was a force so powerful that sometimes, while lying in bed at night, thinking of it, the memory would become real again, almost touchable. 

The memory shattered now in the face of a new and dangerous reality, as she watched the Doctor push through the crowd of children to get to the French window.

Lizzie joined him and the children as they looked out at a spectral figure, draped in white, with a veil covering the now iconic mask. And there was a little girl – not very old – backing away from the figure as it raised its veil with a single skeletal finger, revealing an ornate azure floral pattern on the right side of its face. It seemed to smile at them, and then vanished into the trees behind it.

After it had gone, the Doctor opened the doors and ran down into the garden – with Lizzie close behind him. When he arrived at the little girl, she seemed fine, but shaken. The Doctor, as if he had done his job, stood up and walked over to the trees, following the direction of the figure. Lizzie, in his place, knelt down beside the little girl. She didn’t recognise her; the girl could only have been about as old as Lizzie had been when she had come down here to play as a little girl. 

Pat was running towards them, like a father would run to see if his children were all right. Lizzie gave the shivering girl the kindest and most genuine of smiles.  
“Don’t be scared.”

And the little girl nodded in understanding as Lizzie hugged her. 

“Tell Pat to make sure he keeps the other children in the house. Yeah?”

“Yes,” the girl agreed.

“Good girl.”

Pat arrived and scooped the girl up in his arms, thanking Lizzie, before he ran over to the other children.

Lizzie wished for nothing more than for Pat to be able to help her, to give her the advice she needed now, or for Maggie to suddenly appear and give her a few comforting words. But Maggie was off doing what she did best, and Pat had somebody else who needed his help more.

Her life here had been calm. It hadn’t been easy, but nothing much had happened. Well, quite a bit had happened. But in comparison to whatever was going on now, it seemed simple and trivial, when in fact that’s the one thing it hadn’t been. Once upon a time, she had feared not being liked in school. Then she’d feared exam results. Then she feared debt, and then eviction, and more recently, a masked creature that wanted to kill her.

Now, she couldn’t think of anything more to be scared about. She couldn’t see anything except some very scared children. And her words would not allow her to arrange them in a way that could describe how she felt, but she wanted to help protect the little girl as much as she possibly could, no matter what it took.   
The world around her seemed to pass by in slow-motion, as she turned and stumbled over ground that had once marked her childhood, down to the gap in the trees where she knew she could pass through and into the woods.

All of the children up there, looking at all this from behind the windows of the French doors, would remember this day – it would haunt them. The memory would be passed down to their children and to their children’s children, and eventually it would become a story, a fairy tale, for the simple purpose of scaring children before they went to sleep. 

Just as she had when she met the Doctor, Lizzie now had another choice to make: she could run and be with him or she could stay here and run away from him.   
Lizzie promised the little girl she wouldn’t be long, as she turned and ran into the trees. 

***

The Doctor was waiting for her on the other side, beyond the trees. 

“Are you alright?” he asked.

She wanted to shout at him, to tell him that of course she wasn’t alright. Her whole life had just changed forever, all within the space of a couple of hours, and he was asking her the sort of pointless question that he might’ve also asked a stranger on the street.

“Yes,” she lied, and she could tell that he knew she was lying. “You?”

“Yes,” he lied, and she could tell he was lying.

They continued down the pathway for a second in silence, before the Doctor asked the most obvious question.

“Where does this path go?” 

Lizzie knew this place like the back of her hand. She’d walked it so many times, when she was younger, because it was where she came when she wanted to be alone.

They had arrived.  
It was a woodland clearing, surrounded by old trees – and in the middle, was the oldest, a beautiful old oak that held inside its trunk hundreds and hundreds of rings, etched into its many layers, like the lines on the face of an old, wise man. It stood before them, calm and peaceful, with the beautiful summer sunlight streaming through its leaves. 

Dangling from one of its largest branches was a rope swing, tied on as if it were being gripped tightly and kindly by the tree itself; as if the oak would never let the occupant fall, and would keep them safe forever. Its trunk and branches and leaves were all reflected in a small and clear pool of water near its base; it was like a mirror, and when Lizzie looked into it, she saw herself looking back. 

16, 17, or something years ago, not long after Lizzie had first arrived at the home that had seemed so big and scary, filled with big and scary people, including scary Jenny, the woman who was meant to be looking after her, Lizzie had gone walking down to the bottom of the garden with Maggie. They hadn’t known each other long – but Maggie had helped Lizzie into her little red wellies, and she’d made sure her mackintosh was on and zipped up, and when Lizzie had pretended to do the same with Maggie, and Maggie just went along with it. And they walked, and Lizzie, at the bottom of the garden, saw the trees. She knew she wasn’t allowed to, and normally she would follow the rules to the letter. But she was intrigued, and so once, when nobody was looking, she went down there, ducked through the trees, followed the path – and discovered this place.

She had come here a lot when she was young.. When nobody was looking, she would sneak out the back of the care home, and walk to the end of the path, where she had her tree and her rope swing and her pond. Nobody else knew about it… well, someone, once, must’ve known about it, otherwise there wouldn’t have been the rope swing. But whoever that person was, they were long forgotten, and now the only one to know about its existence was Lizzie. It was her escape.   
When the world got too tough and the people too difficult, she would just run into the woods, like the woods in a fairy story, and eventually she would meet the oak, and its mighty canopy of leaves that protected her like a warm blanket, and be calmed by the way the one branch would hold her and her swing, no matter what. And there, Lizzie would sit on the swing, and gently sway above the ground, and if she felt daring, swing out above the pond itself. 

When she was a child, and she had first discovered it, she held the rope so hard that her hands bled when she finally let go. As she grew older, she held on as hard as she had as a child, but as a teenager, she no longer felt the need to hold so tightly; she knew she would be safe. 

In a way, when she stepped back in here, looking for the Masked Maiden, it was like coming home. 

But now someone else was here too, and that scared her. Someone or something that was murdering people, had found her place where she escaped to. A creature of nightmares had found her home. 

Lizzie could see it, motionless, watching them, from the other side of the pond. it was a nice summer’s day, with almost no breeze, although even if there were a breeze, Lizzie sensed that some quality of the crisp, white, cloth, was helping it stay in exactly the same position. 

“You’re not real,” the Doctor said to its “face.” That confused Lizzie, because he was a man who flew around time and space in a phone box. The only reason he didn’t want to believe that this creature was real, was because it had come from his nightmares.

The Maiden didn’t reply at first, although it did lift its veil and revealed more of the artwork on the mask underneath. It was perfect, like exquisite painting.

“Not real to you, perhaps.” 

It spoke in a clear, female voice, as pure as the white robes and veils it wore, and with an air of unwavering confidence.

The Doctor shrugged, as if in partial agreement. “Then why are you here? Why take the children?”

Although the Maiden did not move perceptibly, something inside it seemed to bristle for a second, as if the Doctor had said something that had disturbed something deep within. 

“I am looking for the prize.”

“What prize?”

“I bring peace and tranquillity,” the Maiden whispered, the words leaving its lips which were non-existent, and yet its words floated through the air to them, clearly, unmuffled by the mask. 

“By stitching their faces up?” the Doctor responded, his voice quivering with anger and contempt.

“It is for their protection, so that they do not have to see how barbaric the world is. If you will not understand, Doctor – then I shall speak to someone who does.”  
“You don’t bring peace and protection! You trap them, you force them to conform! Turning them into nothing,” the Doctor protested.

The Maiden turned towards Lizzie.

And Lizzie realised something. 

“Not seeing the world doesn’t make it any easier. It makes it harder.” Lizzie wasn’t quite sure where she’d got that from, but she stuck with it. The Doctor sighed and was going to say something, but didn’t. 

“But what you’re doing,” Lizzie decided to continue. “You’re taking their identity, their faces – you’re not protecting them from the real world, you are the real world. You just turn children into... drones.”

“Such a terrified little girl,” the Maiden’s voice was heavy and sad as she spoke. She ignored Lizzie. “So nervous and anxious. The world scared you. The world still scares you.”

Lizzie found herself amused by the essential irony of the Maiden’s statements. Its intention was to protect people from the horrors of the world, and yet in doing so, it had become a horror story for children that had scared even the Doctor.

“And are you, I don’t know, erm …attempting to do what you do… to every child?”

If the Maiden’s mask did not always show a faint smile, then it might have smiled now.

“There is one child in particular. But she sleeps, now. She sleeps so very far away, and her dreams are not dreams, but they are plagued by the fuel of nightmares.”

Lizzie wanted to find the child, “the prize,” the Maiden was looking for– she wanted to find them and save them, and stop the Maiden from its twisted donation of ‘peace and tranquillity’, or whatever it had said.

“Why?” Lizzie suddenly asked. “Sorry… to be so…”

But the Doctor was nodding in support of Lizzie and her question and then gestured for the Maiden to answer.   
“I bring good to the world.”

“No,” the Doctor said. “You don’t.”

. “I’m really sorry,” Lizzie began, “…. But … you won’t find your prize here. We’re happy here, and…. we don’t need you … to protect us, as you say. You don’t offer us protection, you offer us a way to bury our heads in the sand.”

Lizzie looked to the Doctor, not because she was looking for support, but because he reminded her of something

“Fairy tales are good,” she continued. “Adults think fairy tales are just for kids but they’re wrong... fairy tales are just... cracked mirrors of the real world. Not just means of escape but… means of understanding too. Anyway… I could be wrong so– “

“No, Lizzie,” said the Doctor. “You’re absolutely right.”

“Very well,” the Maiden sighed. It was almost like an admission of guilt – but the Maiden remained motionless, watching Lizzie.

“What are you doing?” the Doctor said. 

“The prize,” the Maiden said again.

“We’ve literally just said, you can’t have ‘the prize.”

“But I already have her.”

Lizzie knew, at that moment, without even needing to be told, who the prize was. For some reason, the Maiden had decided it was her.

But it didn’t make sense to Lizzie, why such a creature would traverse galaxies just to find her. Lizzie. She didn’t mean anything. She was tiny, in comparison to the rest of the universe. 

“No. No, that doesn’t make sense,” the Doctor was beginning to realise as well – and he looked just as bemused as Lizzie. 

“It makes… perfect sense,” the Maiden said as she reached out a hand, beckoning Lizzie to come toward her. “So scared, Elizabeth. So very scared. But I can help you. I can save you.”

“I – I -,” Lizzie suddenly realised she was crying. “I don’t want to just – I don’t want to give up…”

“I will help you, Elizabeth. Come to me.”

Lizzie hated herself for admitting that there was even a tiny part of her wanting to go to her. There had been more than a few times in her life when she would have given in, accepted this invitation and even would have run towards the Maiden and her promise of protection and support. But now, she realized that even though the rest of the universe scared her, there would always be the stars, and she could face all the demons of the world and beyond, when the stars were watching her like they had all her life. 

And she knew that hiding from them would not bring the peace that the Maiden promised. She could stay, and she could and should face it.

Lizzie backed away slowly, and the Doctor followed her. The Maiden did not move – it just stood watching Lizzie in silence. It had failed to claim its prize. Lizzie began to wonder – what happens now? Did it stay and find someone else to prey upon?

Then, the Maiden placed a bony hand to its face and gently it pulled off its mask.

Underneath, where a face should’ve been, there was nothing. No hair, no eyes, no mouth, no nostrils, no ears. 

Lizzie assumed that the Maiden had been with the mask for so long, it had done what it did to everyone else and closed her eyes for good; that she had been like that for so many years, that the “wounds” had all healed up.

“It doesn’t have a mission anymore,” the Doctor explained as he watched the blank face looking at them. “It’s realised that people are not afraid. And so – it no longer sees itself as necessary.”

Lizzie just felt sorry for her, whoever she was. Perhaps the Maiden been scared once too, and Lizzie wished that somebody had been there to help her.

*** 

“So… why was it after me? The universe is huge…” Lizzie looked at the Doctor sitting on the swing beside her. Upon Dunsworth hill there used to stand a castle. It was ruins, now. There was a set of swings, though, just nearby, so the children of today would play in the grounds. The sun was setting over the town – they could see it all from where they sat. Lizzie could see home. There was a breeze, and Lizzie rocked on the swing, gently, back and forth, letting the gentle motion lead her into a state of calm and serenity. 

“I don’t know. But you’re right, Lizzie, the universe is huge. And it will go and find someone else, I should think,” the Doctor replied.

“How can you be so natural about that? There could be another child who’s going to die.”

“I can’t save everyone, Lizzie.”

“But we can try.”

The Doctor didn’t really know what to say to that because he knew, at heart, she was right. He’d also heard her say “we.” But his only response was, “Why were you so sad?” The Doctor had changed the subject.

“I was scared. Perhaps just nervous. And I still am. But, yeah, I guess, I’m fine. Probably. And … I could ask you the same.”

“I’m sorry?”

Shouldn’t have said that. Really, definitely, shouldn’t have said it out loud. 

“No, don’t worry, it doesn’t matter,” she tried desperately to dig herself out of the hole she was digging herself into.

“No – seriously. I’m interested.”

“I mean – no, it’s stupid.”

“Lizzie, please. Stop putting yourself down. It’s not fair on yourself.” 

“Well” she began, “You just seemed upset. Subdued, kind of. And then when we first got talking, it was kind of like the way people are when they’re close to crying but not actually crying, as if you were reminded of something. And then, after a while, when you were back in the TARDIS, and it was like there was a different person there – as if you were back, doing something you loved, for the first time in… ages.”

The Doctor looked at her, his eyes were tinged with sadness. She realised that she was right, and he was grieving for someone. 

“You don’t need to worry about it,” the Doctor said. 

Lizzie disagreed. She knew he needed help, and she felt… responsible. As if she were the one who to give it to him. 

“I want to.”

“It’s just – it’s not a great time right now.”

She knew that. But she also knew from experience that not talking about it wasn’t a good thing, and she didn’t want that to happen to the Doctor. The incredulous look she gave him was enough to keep him talking. 

“I had a friend. Well – yes. I had a friend. Her name was Jasmine, and we travelled together, in time and space. But then – she died. Saving the universe.”  
“I’ve travelled with other people as well,” the Doctor continued. “But …. always…. I end up on my own.”

Of course… The lonely old man. Lizzie had seen it from the start. And when he got into his TARDIS, and started showing off for her – that was when he felt as if he were back there, in the past, travelling with…

“There was someone else, as well. Tommy. He was the one meant to become Prime Minister, and then… couldn’t.”

Lizzie remembered. This was the person who was meant to help her country. 

“And then – another old, old friend of mine. Robin, she found her own life – and she lived it.”

But not with you, Lizzie realized. The Doctor had lost so many people, and she felt guilty that he was the one who had to go back in time to stop the Maiden from getting her, to save her, to save Lizzie – when, in fact, the person who needed saving more than anyone else, was sitting opposite her.

“And up there,” the Doctor pointed at the orange-tinted sky, which felt the final frontier between their swings and the universe, as the sun was setting over the town around them. “There’s a war.”

She hadn’t dared to ask about what things were like beyond Earth. She certainly knew about strange things happening here, but had wondered what it was like in space…and time. She knew that in the grand scheme of things, her life was tiny, and the universe around her was so much bigger – and because of that, she’d always believed in aliens. But she hadn’t wanted to pry.

“It’s only just beginning,” he continued. “it’s a war between my people and a race called the Daleks. And it’s not the sort of war that’s going to be over quickly. It is going to become the most vicious, and cruel, and barbaric and prolonged conflict the universe has ever faced.”

Lizzie looked up at the beautiful sky – it seemed unnatural that such a war could be happening in a universe so pretty. But she also knew all about masks.   
“My wife is up there,” the Doctor caught Lizzie’s flicker of recognition, as she realised that he was referring to the woman she had seen in the monochrome photo, the woman in the wedding dress. “She’s a doctor. An actual doctor.”

Lizzie hadn’t even realised he wasn’t an actual doctor.

“And she’s helping people.” The Doctor was smiling the wistful. prideful sort of smile that people have when they think about their loved ones that are far, far away, but are still doing something brilliant. “The places that are damaged in the war, the people who are hurt – she helps them.”

“She sounds really lovely.”

“She is.”

Lizzie now saw him as he truly was.. The mystery was gone – she knew who he was, whom he’d lost, why he was sad. The man with the bigger-on-the-inside box. And they sat there, the two of them, lost in the moment, as a war raged on in the universe above their heads, while a world of fear still existed around them.

He turned to her. 

“Come with me.” It wasn’t a question, but as a plea. She could hear the touch of desperation in his voice. 

But she couldn’t just run from all her problems and pretend they didn’t exist. She knew it. He knew it too, and she could see he was worried that she’d say no. But just as the best way to handle her fears and anxieties had been to face them head on, maybe the best way to face the rest of the universe was to face it head on as well. 

She wouldn’t be running away with the Doctor. She’d be facing the universe with him. Wasn’t that a fairytale in itself?

All her life, she’d watched the stars, and realised how tiny she was. And they’d been comforting to her, those great big lights in the dark. But at the same time – there was that darkness. And that scared her, more than anything else: that the universe was just a huge sprawling mass of everything, with their tiny, tiny, tiny, little world marooned in the middle. That feeling of being so small wasn’t scary – it was being terrified by what was so big. 

But ultimately, there was no hesitation for Lizzie. 

“Okay.” That’s all she said.

The TARDIS was waiting for her, not far away. 

She left the swing – Lizzie had always loved swings; her childhood-self had found them very comforting. Now, she glanced behind her to see it rocking sadly in the breeze. Through the warm air of this summer evening, she strode. The Doctor was inside, waiting for her, ready to dance around the console again, and ready to rediscover good all over again. They had the whole of the universe ahead of them, tens of hundreds of thousands of millions of billions of stars and times and worlds and galaxies, all within reach of the doors of the box. She was right outside it now, with all of that ahead of her.

Elizabeth Darwin took one last look at the town she called home.

She stepped inside the TARDIS.

And their lives began again.


	5. Cleo and the Mummy (part 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor and Lizzie begin their adventures in time and space by heading back to Ancient Egypt, where a familiar face is waiting...
> 
> Thanks again to anyone taking the time to read this! :)

**PROLOGUE**

**48 BC**  
  
_“It was the night Ptolomy fell.”  
_  
She stood on the balcony, overlooking her great city. Alexandria. The claustrophobic, muggy weather that constricted her, day in, day out, had been vanquished by the night winds, blowing over the Mediterranean, and turning the perpetual daytime heat into a cold and bitter night. The sea had turned from its shimmering, translucent green, and had morphed into a great pool of inky, unearthly black. As she stood there, watching over her city during the aftermath of the battle, during the aftermath of the day, she imagined what secrets would could hide there, in the shadowed depths of the oceans.  
  
 Now the sun had gone in and the chill had arrived, her bare arms were spattered with goosepimples, and the temperatures crept through to the skin. The men from Rome underestimated the conditions of the night, making them angrier than they already were. She had overheard whisperings from some of the men that Caesar was not impressed with the actions of her brother.  
  
They would meet tomorrow, she decided. She would capitalise on their mutual distaste.  
  
Except, there was an eerie quality to the night. The evening winds had calmed now, no longer gusting and throwing her flowing, hair, wild into oblivion. Instead it was perfectly still. The atmosphere was even stranger by the silence in the streets below. It was too quiet.  
  
Then she turned, and there was someone stood in her bedchamber.  
  
She could see the figure through the door into the room. It was waiting, right on the far side. Motionless, it stood, just out from the shadows, so it remained cloaked in a hood of darkness, while the wall torches illuminated its hideous face in an orange glow.   
  
When she realised what it was, she realised that the figure was not possible.  
  
It was a dead man.  
  
No, it was a dead  _boy_.  
  
He was bandaged up, as the dead always were. His legs and his body were wrapped tight in bandages – they were freshly applied. Except, they were not bound fully – some gaps between the material were left open, with… contraptions of sorts… twine, perhaps, running from different parts of the body.  
When her eyes met the boy’s eyes, she gulped, and stepped into her bedchamber.  
  
Half of its head was roughly bandaged, the other half left open to the world. The half that had been tended to was similar to the body, with… devices, running from it, to other parts of the torso. The other distinguishable feature was the eye – it was not covered by the fabric. But it was not a human eye either. A great, empty, black socket remained, deeper and darker than the sea. When she stared into it, she saw no element of humanity.  
  
The open half was well and truly human, though a deep gash ran from the top of the face to the bottom. She examined it, to try and make some sense of who it was.  
  
“Who are you?” she asked, when she could not work it out.  
  
There was no response, so she tried again.  
  
“Answer me. I am Cleopatra. Queen of Egypt.”  
  
All it could do was stand and watch her.  
  
“Who are you!”  
  
The mummy said nothing, but still it watched her.  
  
She blinked.  
  
And it vanished into the night.

**THE EIGHTH DOCTOR ADVENTURES  
  
CLEO AND THE MUMMY  
  
 Based on an idea by Sam Baker**

 

“Ever heard of spontaneity?”  
  
The Doctor watched Lizzie as she scanned the tall shelf, looming above her. Usually when people stepped into a box that could travel anywhere in time and space, they did not ask to be taken to a library. On Earth.  
  
The History section of the place was huge, with shelves taller than houses bursting with a million tales and a million lifetimes. Lizzie loved libraries, and she loved getting lost in them – this one especially, with its historical section being so rich and in depth.  
  
“You know, I’ve got one of these on the TARDIS.”  
  
Lizzie still didn’t say anything, she just kept tracing a finger along the dusty spines of the books. There were so many histories and encyclopaedias, and so many of them hadn’t been taken out in years – but still they remained, as crucial documents, the only available links to the past.  
  
At least, that’s what Lizzie had  _thought_.  
  
“I  _know_  this library,” she replied to the Doctor’s previous remark, and he looked around confused, having completely forgotten what he’d said about the TARDIS library.  
  
He stepped back, leaving her to it, and leaned against a table.  
  
“You know,” a voice behind him said. “Libraries are amazing. They take people to brand new places. You should let her explore.”  
  
The Doctor turned, to see a woman, sat over a MacBook, with circular glasses perched on her nose.  
  
“Sorry?” he asked, slightly taken aback.  
  
“Sorry, forgive me,” she stood up, offering a hand to shake. “Ameera Iqbal.”  
  
He returned the handshake. “The Doctor.”  
  
“Of what?” she enquired.  
  
“Of everything.”  
  
“Cool. I’m a professor. Egyptology,” she said, gesturing to the thick tome beside her laptop.  
  
“Fascinating subject,” the Doctor leaned in closer, if slightly confused she hadn’t bothered to ask about his doctorate.  
  
“Very much so. I’m writing a paper at the moment on Cleopatra and her life. Interesting woman.”  
  
“I can imagine,” the Doctor took a seat. He could see Lizzie drifting over to them. “Go on then. Most interesting thing about Cleopatra.”  
  
Ameera thought for a few seconds – although it was not as if she had to think. Merely organise her thoughts.  
  
“The fact nobody knows anything about her.”  
  
The Doctor looked intrigued. Lizzie looked  _especially_  intrigued. A historian herself, this was her idea of a brilliant day out.  
  
“I mean, this,” she pointed to her laptop. “Is basically just conjecture. We know a bit, from some of the Roman records left behind, and maybe the odd hieroglyphic here and there. But other than that… nothing.”  
  
“Isn’t history just conjecture?” the Doctor challenged her.  
  
“That’s a whole new can of worms,” Ameera sighed. “But Cleopatra especially. A complete enigma to everyone. And so misinterpreted by people, I believe. But hey. History is interesting like that. So many different interpretations. Who knows what really happened?”  
  
When she looked up, the strange Doctor and his friend had vanished.  
  
 ***  
   
Lizzie stepped into the TARDIS, shutting the doors behind her as the Doctor started fiddling with the controls. They were both thinking exactly the same thing.  
  
The central column slowly rose, up and down, and the TARDIS roared into a great, rasping life.  
  
“Cleopatra! Don’t know why I haven’t thought of her before. Actually, I probably have…”  
  
Lizzie didn’t have a clue what he was talking about half the time. All she could think about now was that somehow, she was travelling in time. The science defied her, but she didn’t care.  
  
“Time travel, Lizzie. We can go back, we can go forward. And sideways. Remember that. Especially sideways.”  
  
“… what other people have you met?” she asked, as the question suddenly came to her. If one had a time machine, it would make sense that they’d met a good many interesting people.  
  
“I met Da Vinci. Anne Boleyn as well. I had a picnic with William the Conqueror – actually, it was more of a pre-conquest feast,  _and_ I did life-drawing with Joseph Stalin.”  
  
Lizzie wondered who the model was. But she listened to the Doctor as she rattled off the list, with a life she hadn’t heard in him before, an excitement, an enjoyment – he was happy, then and there.  
  
The bigger-on-the-inside box stopped.  
  
They had arrived.  
  
Her previous TARDIS trips had been within the realms of normality – only a few streets away, nothing too unusual. But ahead of her was a world that nobody else from her world had walked on. Something that shouldn’t ever happen, but something that was about to happen.  
  
There was a strange feeling inside her, a fusion between excitement and fear, stomach-churning but in a good way. It was as if butterflies were fluttering about inside her, but they were happy, their wings beating in euphoria. Her hand connected with the door and gave it a gentle push, as she wanted to savour this feeling of being somewhere brand new and somewhere impossible, so she wouldn’t forget it again for as long as she lived.  
  
The door gently swung open, revealing a whole world in front of her. They were only parked in an alley-way, a fairly unassuming sight, but little did anyone else wondering around know, that this would be the alley-way to have broadened Lizzie’s experience of the universe more than anyone could have realised.  
  
It was excitement beyond anything she had imagined previously.  
   
***  
   
As soon as Lizzie stepped out of the TARDIS, she had to take off her jumper and throw it inside. It was as if someone had slapped her in the face with the heat, and she suddenly felt unexpectedly faint. She took a few steps more down the alley-way of dreams, admiring the two sun-bleached stone buildings on either side, in awe of how real they were..  
  
The street ahead of them was congested with market stalls – wooden tables bordered the entire walkway, covered in a plethora of goods. There were spices, and had Lizzie not been so knocked back by the heat, she would be able to smell them. Hardened clay pots, recently dried in the heat of the sun, were being sold from another stall, and precisely entwined wicker baskets sold from a third. Sugar canes, cut down from the banks of the Nile, were being bartered away. There was a constant overlay of sound to the proceedings, of the townspeople going about their normal, humdrum lives.  
  
“They all speak English,” Lizzie observed, as the Doctor stepped out behind her.  
  
“The TARDIS translates them.”  
  
She wondered if there was anything the TARDIS couldn’t do, as the two of them set off, making their way down the street, passing the people and the stalls and the buying and selling as they went. Lizzie watched as her feet made light footprints in the sand and dust beneath them, and she made an impossible mark on the world. Anxiety piqued within her as she worried whether that footprint would change the course of human history forever. It was irrational, of course, considering the Doctor had done life-drawing with Stalin, but even so. Lizzie made the executive decision that she was going to push everything aside. No worrying today.  
  
She realised as they walked, that they must look so out of place, in modern fashions – but nobody seemed to care.  
  
The Doctor looked at her, as if he were waiting for her to say it, his script on pause – and clearly he were enjoying the pause.  
  
“It’s because they’re all so busy, doing what they do. We’re just passers-by,” she realised.  
  
In a peculiar way, the world hadn’t changed much.  
  
“So,” the Doctor grinned. Although he had done this so many times before, he always felt so much more alive when seeing it again, through the eyes of somebody brand new. “Antirhodos is over… there,” the Doctor pointed in a rough direction.  
  
“… and… how do we… I don’t know, meet her?”  
  
“I usually just walk in.”  
  
“And… people let you do that?”  
  
“No, not usually.”  
  
That was reassuring.  She watched as the Doctor strode confidently on, and she had to remind herself to just go with the flow. If she was hanged or beheaded for trespassing, so what? There was something unreal about the way the Doctor walked, as if he could be quite confident about swaggering around in the past. Lizzie tried to swagger after him with similar levels of confidence, and just looked a bit stupid, so she stopped.  
   
***  
   
“My Lord Caesar.”  
  
The Roman Emperor, dressed in long, blood-red robes strode up to her, and knelt down. He kissed her hand, and then stood again.  
  
“My Queen.”  
  
Caesar gestured for her to sit, and she did so. Caesar sat opposite her.  
  
“A great victory, my Lord,” Cleopatra took a sip from her wine. “And I am eternally thankful that my kingdom has been returned to its… rightful Queen.”  
“For sure,” Caesar agreed. “I believe your tyrant brother died in the fighting.”  
  
Cleopatra thought back to the events of the previous night. Death had always seemed so normal and so every day. Except this time, it was her brother – and her brother was her brother. However, he had become someone else, threatening their kingdom by becoming embroiled in conflicts he shouldn’t. She had lost her brother and she was sad, but she was devastated for the person he had come. She was determined to rule in the way he hadn’t.  
  
Many other people had died too. Cleopatra held herself together over it. People died all the time. It was not a problem.  
  
Although it had become a problem, ever since the dead began to walk.  
  
“Queen?”  
  
Realising she had practically left the room, Cleopatra realised who she was sat opposite.  
  
“Yes, my Lord. And a good thing – my brother is not fit to live alongside us.”  
  
“To Rome I shall return,” Caesar said. “Though I will leave men here, to protect your throne.”  
  
Cleopatra hesitated, and her face turned.  
  
“You are… spying on me?”  
  
“I am protecting you.”  
  
She was wary of them. Her kingdom had so easily gone to war over rulers before, and she did not want to allow it to happen again. Especially if Egypt was to be ruled from the backdoor of Rome.  
  
“My Lord, you must understand. Seas of blood have been shed over my rule. Although I may let your men stay for the good of the protection of my throne, I will see to it that they do not dare rule for me.”  
  
Caesar gave a coy smile. “They… shall not.”  
  
“After all. This is an alliance that must work both ways. Endeavor to make sure it does not break down.”  
  
Caesar sat back, impressed at the force of the woman sat opposite him. It did not seem as if he would be able to have his say for much longer.  
Queen Cleopatra stood up, and her robes trailed behind her as she left.  
  
As the Queen made her way out into the passageway beyond Caesar’s chambers, a handmaiden walked beside her.  
  
“My Queen,” she began. “There is a doctor here to see you.”  
  
Admittedly, Cleopatra was confused. She had not sent for a doctor.  
  
And yet, she said nothing.  
   
***  
   
Set on an island, Cleopatra’s palace was magnificent. And yet, in a thousand years or so, a great tsunami would transform it into nothing but dust.  
From the chamber that Lizzie and the Doctor stood, they could hear the Mediterranean gently buffeting the stone bricks outside, with salty, frothy foam bursting up the sides of the lighthouse. The sea was gentle, and Lizzie stood watching the emerald waters lap gently far beneath where she stood. It would be perfect weather to bathe in. Gentle though they seemed, however, as the waves crawled up, it was as if they were a nest of blackbird chicks, fighting each other for seeds and nuts and worms, clawing through the masses.  
  
The Doctor was pacing the Queen’s chamber, admiring the illustrious artworks on the wall, so antique and exquisite. It was a whole room of fineries, and yet it was not extravagant. Silk curtains were drawn beside the window looking down onto the ocean below, and a simple, wooden throne was positioned at the head of the room. A rug paved the way from the small door at the far side of the room to the throne, patterned with detailed intricacies. They were, of course, breaking all protocol – it was the rug they were meant to walk down, and not the Queen.  
  
 His guise was of a Doctor – after all, people lied best when keeping it close to the truth. Lizzie still didn’t think they would last particularly long – they had just broken into the Queen’s palace, and made their way into the throne room.  
  
Eventually, the far door opened, and Cleopatra waited for them.  
  
Though the stories got many things wrong about Cleopatra, it was no secret that she was a figure of glorious beauty – her hair ran to just below the neck, and was blacker than the night. A simple, gold headdress adorned her, and it was almost a collar of cut jewels, of emeralds brighter than the sea outside, and of rubies darker than the blood-red curtains, that she wore perched across her neck. She wore simple, white robes beneath it, and she did not seem startled to find the Doctor and Lizzie waiting in her throne room.  
  
Lizzie gulped, terrified of the woman who strode confidently in the room, a historical misconception living and breathing in front of her. Stories had been written about this woman, and yet nobody where she came from knew the truth. As time trawled on she had become buried under layers of manipulated history, until what remained was a mere caricature of the original. And now Lizzie was watching her, determined to see her for who she truly was, and not the fake version spun in the modern day.  
  
 “You are… a doctor, yes?”  
  
“I am, my Queen,” the Doctor replied, stepping away from admiring one of the paintings. Lizzie stepped into the room, and the Doctor turned to her.  
“Cleopatra,” he whispered to Lizzie, to try and make sure Cleopatra herself couldn’t hear.  
  
“Comin’ atcha,” Lizzie murmured.  
  
 “I give you the last Pharaoh of ancient Egypt, and you make 90s music puns?” the Doctor scowled.  
  
Lizzie didn’t have him down as one for 90s R&B.  
  
Cleopatra nodded, and turned to her guard. “You will leave us.”  
  
“Yes, my Queen.”  
  
The guard left, and Cleopatra entered the throne room, gently shutting the door behind her. She turned to Lizzie.  
  
“This is my assistant,” the Doctor explained. “She is an expert in many matters that are beyond my understanding.”  
  
Lizzie thought that he was probably right, but if he ever called her his assistant again she’d get very cross.  
  
“Then she may stay,” Cleopatra did not make her way to the throne. “How did you know to come?”  
  
“Some of your servants believed you were acting strangely, my Queen. They thought that perhaps, you had come down with something,” the Doctor lied, playing along in a bid to extract whatever mysterious horror had made Cleopatra call a doctor. Lizzie, meanwhile, felt something strangely liberating about lying to an ancient Egyptian Queen.  
  
Cleopatra looked shocked, but she didn’t question him.  
  
“You must not speak to anyone about our conversation,” Cleopatra explained. The Doctor approached her, a warm smile on his face. “If you did so, I would fear for my throne.”  
  
“Of course, my Queen.”  
  
There was a pause, and Cleopatra stood, deep in thought. The future of her kingdom depended on what she said now. She made her way to one of the benches, and sat down.  
  
“I am being watched.”  
  
The Doctor waited, though already his interest had been piqued.    
  
“I am being watched,” she continued. “By the dead.”  
  
Unlike most doctors, who would have backed away, the Doctor moved closer to the Queen, while Lizzie waited a fair distance away.  
  
“You must think I am… ill,” Cleopatra muttered, suddenly realising what she had said outside. “But I swear to you,” she looked at the Doctor, and their eyes met, hers with an earnestness. “I’m not lying.”  
  
“No,” the Doctor shook his head. “I don’t believe you are. Who are you being watched by, Cleo? What do they look like?”  
  
Lizzie let out an audible gasp at the way the Doctor addressed her – not that she had a problem with it, she was just concerned he was going to be… beheaded or something.  
  
But the Queen did not bat an eyelid, as whatever was watching her terrified her beyond words, and she would be willing to forgive such insolence if it meant the dead were dealt with.  
  
“A mummy. It was last night, and I was in my bedchamber. And it stood there, and… it was dead. It did not move – it stayed, perfectly still, watching me.”  
“Ohh… fascinating. Cleo, stay calm. We’re going to find them.”  
  
“Wait,” Cleo looked at him in disbelief for the first time. “You believe me?”  
  
“Absolutely,” the Doctor looked over to Lizzie, and she nodded. “So does Lizzie.”  
  
She most certainly did. After everything that Lizzie Darwin had seen in the last few days (few days? Her entire perception of time had been completely warped. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d slept), she would believe anything. Lizzie gave Cleopatra a friendly smile – which wasn’t something she ever thought she’d do.  
  
“Believe me, Cleo. We’ll find them.”  
  
The Doctor left the throne room, leaving Lizzie stood looking at a bemused Cleopatra.  
  
“He believed me?” she said again.  
  
“I think he sees this stuff a lot,” Lizzie took a deep breath, trying to ignore the fact she was stood, alone, in a room with Cleopatra.  
  
“What kind of doctor  _is_ he?”  
  
“A strange one. Actually I don’t really know.”  
  
Cleo looked at the doors the Doctor had left wide open. “One who is a complete irritation, it seems.”  
  
Lizzie laughed – actually, properly laughed, and didn’t just laugh out of fear of execution. Cleopatra was actually a rather nice woman.  
  
“You should stand up to your friend more,” Cleopatra declared.  
  
“I’ve only just met him,” Lizzie admitted.  
  
“Lizzie? That was your name, was it not?”  
  
“Yes – yes, my… my Queen.”  
  
“Even more reason to do it, then.”  
   
***  
   
It was the dead of night in the palace, and Lizzie was wondering who the Doctor truly was, as they crept down the sandstone corridors, trying to remain as quiet as possible. On one hand, the man with the magic box seemed like an impossible time traveller. On the other hand, it all felt a bit… Scooby Doo.  
  
“Do the monsters follow you around?” she eventually asked, determined to break the awkward silence. It was the only sound, other than their footsteps tapping gently against the floor.  
  
They’d been mummy-hunting for a good half an hour, and had seen nothing. The Doctor walked ahead, the sonic screwdriver gently pulsating with light with each step they took, and he was seemingly in his element. An element he had missed, by the looks of the way his eyes lit up at every new corner and door. There was no logic to the way they searched the palace – they just followed the light pulses. They turned corners, and took flights of stairs, and went through all sorts of rooms they probably shouldn’t have gone through.  
  
“It’s just… coincidence, I think,” the Doctor admitted, as they turned onto a long, wide corridor with ornate tapestries draped along the walls. “Half the time I follow them.”  
  
There were several doors stationed along the corridor. One of them had a tall, barrel-chested guard stood outside. Lizzie accidentally made eye contact and awkwardly waved at him. The guard remained motionless and Lizzie knew this horrendous social encounter would haunt her for a good few days. Lizzie caught up with the Doctor, trying to forget the incident had ever happened.  
  
“So… this is how it works. You go somewhere… and you fight evil and stuff?”  
  
“Basically, yes. And I must admit, Lizzie, you’ve hit the jackpot on your first go. Ancient Egypt, Cleopatra, and mummies. Mummies stalking Cleopatra. That’s lucky.”  
  
_I feel humbled_. The weirdness was a bit too much for sarcasm. She was too internally excited, at having actually spoken to Cleopatra.  
  
It got weirder, however.  
  
The door at the far end of the corridor swung open with Indiana Jones style theatrics, and a shadow staggered through.  
  
“Hello…,” the Doctor murmured, flicking the sonic screwdriver away back into his pocket. “Who are you…”  
  
As the shadow stumbled its way down the corridor towards them, and into the light of the burning orange torches, they both realised exactly what it was.  
  
The mummy.  
  
Whether it was the one stalking the Queen, or whether there were more of them, they were unsure. What they were looking at was a mummy.  
  
It walked upright, except it was as if it were only walking for the first time, and it hadn’t quite got to grips with how its legs functioned. Because of that, it took one step at a time, thinking between each as to what muscles had to move to move another. It walked in a constant, stop-start rhythm, one foot, then the other, one foot, then the other. Eventually it stopped, about ten metres away from where they stood. It was then that they could get a good look at it.  
  
The mummy was tall. Tall-ish. Both legs were bandaged – except unlike the mummy Cleo had described, the bandages here were old and yellowed, and peeling off in several places. Wires and tubes poked through the fabric, running to other parts of the body, adding an air of artificiality to the creature. The body was similar, bound tight in antique, stained bandages, peeling off and torn and ripped. Again, wires and tubes ran from the torso to other parts of the body. Also connected to the part of the fabric was a panel – it looked like a partially severed iPhone, and buttons and switches and glowing little lights decorated the rest of it. The head was the most bizarre part – a hodgepodge of mummy and human and robot. Some of it was bandaged, binding the skin on the human bits tight. The visible skin was grey and dead – no blood had run through it in years. And then the robotics… the two eyes had been replaced with metal plates, and embedded in each of the plates was a cold, empty socket, staring out at them.  
  
“Oh, Lizzie…,” the Doctor sounded almost in awe. “You really have hit the jackpot on your first go.”  
  
His eyes were drawn to the top of the head. Two pieces of metal protruded from the side, and connected above the head – almost like handlebars.  
  
“You recognise it?” she asked the Doctor.  
  
He didn’t respond. When she looked at him, he was grimacing, his face a picture of shock, and disgust, and…  
  
Recognition.  
  
“The Cybermen.”  
  
The word meant nothing to her, but the Doctor said it with a distinct force and distaste.  
  
“You… you know what it is, though?”  
  
“Oh yes,” the Doctor didn’t move from his spot, and told her to stop moving as well. The Cyberman-mummy remained perfectly still, staring at them. “The Cybermen are old friends of mine. I say friends. I mean…”  
  
“Enemies?”  
  
“Yes. But I say enemies, they’re not… they’re not malicious, far from it. They’re evolution.  They’re humans. But they’re advanced humans. Humanity mark 2, perhaps – when we get sick of our flesh bodies, and we decided we’ve had enough of pain and sickness, then… that’s what we become.”  
  
Lizzie shivered, swallowing back bile, and stared at the creature staring at them, unable to comprehend that the thing opposite her had once been… the same as her. Except, she also could not bring herself to despise it too much, for she understood that that was where humanity would naturally evolve to. Regardless of that, the future, stood in front of her now, was sickening. But somehow it had changed, so much so that it looked completely different… but still uncannily human.  
  
“You,” the Doctor said. “Yes, I’m talking to you, Cyberman. What do you want here?”  
  
“We………….”  
  
It spoke in a voice that made Lizzie cringe – as if an autotuned voice had gone horribly wrong, and the equipment vastly misused – the wrong words and sounds were emphasised, and when they came out the pitch was distorted.  
  
“We….. we….”  
  
“Go on,” the Doctor encouraged mockingly, nothing but contempt in his voice. “Spit it out, now.”  
  
“The – the – the Cybermeeeeeee –”  
  
“It’s weak,” the Doctor dared to approach a little closer, suitably reassured that the Cyberman was on the harmless side. Though looking at the way the Doctor looked at the Cyberman… harmless probably still meant ‘pretty dangerous’.  
  
“The Cybermen – crashed – upon this planet.”  
  
“Oh… interesting. It’d explain why you’re so… patchwork…”  
  
“Are they always like this, then?” Lizzie asked, looking at the almost makeshift man, and then looking away because of the unnerving familiarity.  
“Depends on their timeline. Some of them are far more roboticised than others. This lot – well, it’s not only early in their timeline, but they’re running low on resources as well, I should think,” the Doctor turned back to the Cyberman. He didn’t need to worry – the Cyberman was waiting for him. It was as if it couldn’t be bothered to attack. Or as if it had something better to be concerned about. “What do you want with Cleopatra?”  
  
“Your question is… irrelevant.”  
  
The Doctor gave a confused look. “No, I don’t think so. Tell me.”  
  
The Cyberman didn’t respond, and the Doctor looked almost fed up at his inability to embrace the Scooby-Doo chasing-aliens side of his travelling. He sighed, a kind of ‘what’s the point’ sigh – sick of the monsters being terrible at being interrogated.  
  
“They’re so... depleted of everything,” the Doctor took out the sonic screwdriver, giving the still-mostly-human creature the once over. “They can barely talk.”  
  
The Doctor already looked confused. Lizzie was pretty certain that wasn’t meant to happen. He ran a hand through his short locks of hair, and stroked the little facial hair he had, and looked to one of the tapestries on the wall. It portrayed eight figures – Lizzie didn’t recognise them, but they were the sort of Egyptian figures, that one often saw in art galleries.  
  
“Heh,” the Doctor gave a small laugh.  _No_ , Lizzie realised. It wasn’t a small laugh. She gave him a confused glance, and the Doctor winked at her, and then turned to the Cyberman. “Hmm. Perhaps my Egyptian mythology is better than your databanks.”  
  
Lizzie nudged him, and he turned to her. “Heh. Part of the Ogdoad, Egyptian God of eternity.”  
  
Lizzie was coming to realise that no matter how much the Doctor explained things, sometimes they still didn’t make any sense. At all.  
  
“Cybermen, or Cyberman, I don’t know yet whether there are any more of you. I will, though. Oh, I will. See you in about… four-ish years? Give or take.”  
  
The Doctor turned on his heels, and Lizzie was stood awkwardly looking at the Cyberman. She shrugged her shoulders, and the Cyberman looked on at her emotionless. She turned to follow the Doctor.  
  
 ***  
   
The Doctor and Lizzie walked down the stone pier, back to the shore. It was well into the night now, and the hustle and bustle of the market was long gone now. Instead, the eerie city silence of the small hours had set in, and a thick, viscous darkness had settled over the city. Lizzie took her phone out of her pocket to switch the torch on, before putting it away again, still concerned it would screw up the entire space-time continuum or something.  
  
“What was all that about?” Lizzie asked him, loitering behind slightly.  
  
“That Cyberman, Lizzie. It was basically harmless. But it will be active, soon – believe me, it will be.”  
  
The Doctor ran his plan through his head. They were going to go, come back in about four years, and wait for the Cybermen to... do more stuff. It was the only way, to avoid the Cybermen doing anything stupid in advance.  
  
“So  _that's_ your plan," Lizzie observed.  
  
“You don’t even know what I was thinking,” the Doctor exclaimed, while Lizzie found herself getting increasingly irritated by him.   
  
“I do,” Lizzie said. “You’re thinking we're going to wait for the Cyberman to… do more stuff?”  
  
“Okay, yes. I am.”  
  
He was thinking exactly that.  
  
“Because it’s stalking an ancient Egyptian Queen, and having met the Cybermen before… that’s unusual.”  
  
Lizzie remembered the way the Cyberman had just watched her, but she couldn’t help but wonder whether it would try and make a move against Cleopatra. Try and do to her what it had done to itself, perhaps?  
  
“How does time work?”  
  
It sounded less obscure and random in her head. The Doctor probably thought the same.  
  
“It’s like jenga.”  
  
_Okaaay._  Even the word made her shiver at how awful she was at that game.  
  
“You can play about with it,” the Doctor continued. “You can… take bits out. Except, unlike jenga, unless you cheat like Mrs Thatcher, when it falls, the entire universe collapses.”  
  
“So…,” Lizzie sat down on the wall, dangling her legs down over the beach below, the vertigo becoming suddenly nauseating. “Time is basically… one massive jenga.”  
  
“Exactly! This huge, complex tower, of so many different parts, all working together, all in harmony with each other. And you can move bits, and take bits out, and even add bits in…”  
  
The Doctor’s voice trailed off, but he looked up at her, as if he were helping her learn, slowly encouraging her. She continued for him.  
“But, of course, if you disturb it too much… then the whole thing topples.”  
  
“Exactly,” the Doctor confirmed.  
  
It had been bothering her for a while, and she was pleased that the Doctor had finally put her worries to rest. Though when she stepped out of the TARDIS, she was too concerned about doing something so small that could somehow result in her not being born. She didn’t tell him, though. He’d probably just laugh at her. Especially if he’d done life drawing with Stalin.  
  
_Walk like an Egyptian.  
_  
And a familiar tambourine beat began to drift through the night. Lizzie blushed, and scrambled around trying to find her phone, which she’d put into one of her pockets but couldn’t find it anywhere. Stupid ringtone…  
  
“Sorry, sorry, sorry…”  
  
The Doctor stood, watching her, trying not to laugh. “Didn’t have you down as a fan of The Bangles.”  
  
“Me? Oh, erm, yeah. 80s music… kind of my thing. Didn’t have you down as a fan of Cleopatra,” Lizzie paused. “Comin’ atcha. The band, I mean. The 90s R &B.”  
  
It was as if there was a moral obligation to do the “comin’ atcha” bit. Lizzie never felt properly satisfied unless she’d said it.  
  
“I’m not. Intergalactic Spotify is amazing, puts together all sorts of playlists I don’t really care about.”  
  
Lizzie couldn’t actually imagine him listening to music at all, when she thought about it. Most people, she could look at them, and tell exactly what they were into. The Doctor – she wasn’t so sure. But one thing was for certain. Spotify did not just put together random playlists.  
  
“Come on, Lizzie. We’ve got to go and meet Cleopatra.”  
  
Silence, as the Doctor began to walk, and Lizzie stood up to follow him. She had always felt her loyalties between academia and then the bright and vibrant world of fiction and music and dancing and art. She was well aware many found the same enjoyment in studying… but she’d never managed it. There had always been some niggling feeling in the back of her mind that as much as she studied, it couldn’t teach her anymore about what was truly important. Her true retreat had always been into the worlds that she could just enjoy. The worlds that she didn’t have to stress about.  
  
“Comin’ atcha,” she whispered into the night.


	6. Cleo and the Mummy (part 2)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lizzie listens to some music, and begins to discover the mystery of the Cybermen haunting Ancient Egypt. But the Doctor gets distracted.
> 
> He's having dinner with Cleopatra.
> 
> thanks again to the amazing Sam Baker who came up with the idea for this chapter of the Doctor and Lizzie's adventures. And, thanks to everyone who's reading this ^_^ it means the world.

**44 BC** **  
**  
The journey to her throne felt as if it took forever. Perhaps it was the realm of eyes upon her, as slowly Queen Cleopatra walked down to the simple wooden seat at the far end of the room, with each step on the decorated rug taking twice as long. Servants and handmaidens and soldiers lined the pathway for her. All she knew was that the journey from Rome had been nothing in comparison to what she was enduring now.  
  
Eventually she arrived, and turned to face her staff. They watched her in silence, and she couldn’t stand thinking about what they must be thinking.

  
“You will leave me.”  
  
The audience wavered. A brief moment of hesitation passed for all of them, and then eventually, they all turned and filed out of the door, one by one.  
Cleopatra was glad to have them gone. They were the last people she was ready to face. Although, in some way - after the events that had befallen in Rome, and the events that had occurred here, in Egypt, Cleopatra felt even more determined to rule than she had done before. To defend her kingdom. To protect it.  
  
Then she looked up, and saw the lone man stood in line. He was in the same position as he had been before – except everyone surrounding him had gone.

  
“Did you not hear me, sir?”  
  
The man didn’t say anything.  
  
“Leave me! Or I shall have you dead.”  
  
If there was one thing that the Queen could not abide, it was insolence.  
  
“My Queen,” the man began, stepping out in front of her.  
  
She recognised him – but it took a few moments for who he really was to settle in her head. He was unforgettable.  
  
“You…,” she was aghast, unsure what she should say. The man slipped from the shadows and into the torchlight.  
  
He looked no different to how he had appeared four years ago. As in –completely identical, right down to his clothing, and his hair – close copped curls, with a spattering of a beard, and a long coat. Scuffed brown boots, and a bag dangling by his hip. It was now that she noticed his attire was most unusual. His face was emotionless, his piercing blue eyes staring right into hers.  
  
“You need to stay hidden,” Cleo said immediately.  
  
“Why?” the Doctor walked towards her.  
  
“Because I put out an order to have you found and executed.”  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“You said you’d find my stalker, and you disappeared. I do not appreciate being treated like that.”  
  
“And so you thought you’d behead me?” the Doctor leaned up close to her.  
  
“I’ll still behead you,” she pushed him away. “Where is Lizzie?”  
  
The Doctor was surprised that Cleopatra had remembered her. “Gone off exploring.”  
  
“Did you find my stalker?” Cleo asked suddenly. She was concerned. After all – she still saw the mummy watching her sometimes. During fleeting moments of sleep, when she was drifting in and out of consciousness, it would be stood in the far corner of the chamber, watching her from the strange dimension of slipping in and out of slumber. Eventually she would wake herself up – and it would be real. But within seconds, it would vanish again. Whenever she saw it, Cleo’s mind always wandered… who was the Doctor who promised to find out who it was?  
  
“Yes. I’ve got Lizzie working on it now,” the Doctor looked nervously over his shoulder – it was something more of a nervous twitch than anything else. He was concerned for her, and it was not the most sensible thing to send her to do when he’d only just offered to take her with him.  
  
“Who is it?”  
  
“It’s a Cyberman.”  
  
Cleo looked surprisingly unsurprised.  
  
“You believe me?” the Doctor hadn’t expected Cleopatra to be so easily swayed.  
  
“Since meeting you, and since the absurdity of this… Cyberman, I think I’d believe anything. You must dine with me.”  
  
The Doctor gleefully accepted – another historical encounter he could add to his repertoire. He had secretly been rather smug when he’d told Lizzie he did life drawing with Stalin, and with great joy had watched as she’d tried to work out which one of them had been the model.  
   
***  
   
As Lizzie slunk through the underbelly of the palace, she had to do a bit of a reality check. People often round themselves strangely accepting of things, however unlikely they may have once seemed. There’s never the ‘oh my god’ breakdown that most people expect. Lizzie wondered whether it was to do with the fact that the world in itself was such a strange place, that even weirder things didn’t seem that weird.  
  
She was, admittedly, wary, that the Doctor had sent her off to go and have a look around and see if she could find some Cybermen. She was truly being thrown in at the deep end… though she didn’t mind. If anything, it was strangely liberating, being allowed to go and have a look around on her own.  
Before meeting a man with a time machine, she’d always found it very difficult to visualise history. It was as if she could only see it in the monochrome of photographs, and not picture the colour or the vibrancy or the life. For example, one could not taste the musty air from the depths of the palace. One could not smell the peculiar lingering stench of rot. One could not feel the sandstone bricks that had been so sturdily constructed to form an almighty structure. It was a stupid thing to think about anyway, because nobody had any visual record of ancient Egypt, apart from paintings. Though it didn’t matter – because of all those limitations, picturing history was so difficult. Perhaps it explained why she felt so unnerved about walking there.  
  
The freedom of walking alone wasn’t to last. She stepped around a corner, and suddenly a child ran into her.  
  
She couldn’t have been much more than 10, 11 perhaps. Some servant to the Queen, perhaps. But when she looked at Lizzie, Lizzie saw nothing but terror in her eyes, and she opened her mouth to scream.  
  
Lizzie put a finger to her lips and gave the girl a glare to shut her up. Then she felt guilty, and her face turned into a sympathetic smile. The girl instantly seemed at ease.  
  
“What’s your name?” Lizzie asked her. Lizzie loved children… it was something to do with all that potential they held. The ability to do something truly special, and the fact that you could be part of that.  
  
“Nephthys,” the girl whispered. Then she started to talk, about all sorts of things really quickly at a speed Lizzie could barely understand. “There’s a monster. A… a… it’s a dead man.”  
  
“Okay,” Lizzie said, taking deep breaths, trying to get Nephthys to imitate her, in the hope it could calm her down. “I’m going to go and find out who it is. Stay here, okay?”  
  
The girl seemed reluctant, and Lizzie realised that she’d feel too guilty leaving her behind.   
  
“Stay close,” Lizzie said, and she stood up, slowly easing her way around the corner to see what was down the corridor. Nephthys’s hand curled into hers, and Lizzie squeezed it, trying to make her feel safe. They turned the corner together, and began to make their way together.  
  
There was a painfully awkward silence.  
  
“Do you like music?”  
  
“Yes.”  
Lizzie reached into her pocket, and took out her phone. So what if she caused the entirety of space and time to collapse? She went onto ‘music’, and selected The Bangles.

 _All the old paintings on the tombs._  
  
_They do the sand dance, don’t you know._  
  
_If they move too quick (oh way oh)._  
  
_They’re falling down like a domino._  
  
Nephthys looked up at her, bemused at the alien tambourines and the foreign buzz of electric guitars, and the unfamiliar voice of Susanna Hoffs.  
  
“Your songs are strange.”  
  
Lizzie spent most of her teenage years hearing exactly the same thing. Nephthys looked up at the ceiling in a moment of contemplation, as if this was the make-or-break moment.  
  
What did an Egyptian truly think of The Bangles?  
  
“I love it!” Nephthys sounded delighted, throwing her arms up in the air, proving once and for all that Egyptians don’t actually ‘walk like Egyptians’.  
  
_All the bazaar men by the Nile,_  
  
_They got the money on a bet._  
  
_Gold crocodiles (oh way oh)_  
  
_They snap their teeth on your cigarette._  
  
“I don’t understand the words…,” Nephthys was trying to decipher the unfamiliar language – her face was one of someone completing a jigsaw puzzle, using trial and error to try and work out what meant what and what went where. Except with the jigsaw puzzle Nephthys was working on, the pieces were strange shapes and had abstract images showed nothing she had ever seen before. Then she glanced at Lizzie’s phone, suddenly realising that the music wasn’t being played from anyone – it was coming from the strange device in her hand.  
  
“What’s that?” Nephthys asked.  
  
“It’s…,” Lizzie fumbled around for some lie that would make sense, but before she could think of anything, Nephthys’ eyes widened.  
  
“Are you a god?!” she exclaimed, her face the picture of surprised.  
  
“No,” Lizzie laughed. “I’m… I’m a traveller.”  
  
Technically it wasn’t a lie.  
  
“Where are you from?” Nephthys continued the interrogation.  
  
 “Somewhere… far away from here,” Lizzie murmured, the thought of how impossibly distant Dunsworth felt making her woozy. It was so far away – in every way that could possibly be imagined.  
  
“I’d like to go and see faraway places one day,” Nephthys mused aloud. Lizzie listened to the way she said it – it was dreamy, as if what she was saying could only ever be words, and wouldn’t take the form of anything more.  
  
It reminded her of the way she used to dream of going places, but couldn’t, because she was too scared.  
  
_And look at me now._  
  
“Then… go for it.”  
  
Nephthys mumbled a series of uncertain sounds. “I don’t know…”  
  
“Even if it feels impossible… all sorts of things happen.”  
  
Nephthys tightened her grip on Lizzie’s hand, as if she were grabbing on for reassurance. Beside her, the little girl relaxed a little.  
  
It didn’t last long – only seconds later a door, like those from some cliched ancient and forgotten tomb, slid upwards, scraping against the stone. A bandaged figure silently walked out – a Cyberman.  
  
Before Lizzie could pull Nephthys into the nearby porch, Nephthys had pulled Lizzie, and they stood there, hoping that the shadows could conceal them for long enough.  
  
Perhaps the Cyberman was just on routine patrol or something. It was not the one she’d seen four years ago – grey, dead hands were unbandaged, and the yellowing dressings that did stick to the body were peeling off in several places, revealing a patchwork of plastic and skin and bone and alloys, a disharmony of ancient and futuristic. The bandages on the face revealed a small slit for a mouth, and one eye remained human (ish – any light that once made the eye bright with living had long since been extinguished), while the other eye was a hellish, inky pit.  
  
It walked right past them, and Lizzie held her breath in some desperate bid to make sure the Cyberman didn’t notice them. She noticed that Nephthys did the same. And they waited like that, for what felt like hours, but was probably only seconds, as the Cyberman walked past them in its rhythmic stumble.  
The Cyber-mummy (a term Lizzie was growing quite affectionate towards) walked to the end of the corridor, and paused for a few seconds. Its head jolted in rotation from side to side – it seemed to be looking for someone. The terrible thought crossed her mind that it was probably, definitely her, but she tried to forget about it, out of fear that somehow it would be able to hear her thoughts, and find her.  
  
When the Cyberman walked back, it did so quickly. And it turned, and went back the way it came.  
  
Lizzie quickly ushered Nephthys out of their porchway, and through the sliding stone door the Cyberman had left through, before it shut, grinding to the floor with a prolonged shudder.  
   
***  
   
“Wine for my Queen?” the Doctor held out the flagon.  
  
“You say that, but only as a matter of courtesy,” Cleopatra observed, sitting opposite the Doctor.  
  
Cleopatra’s dining room was spacious – designed for large feasts with her generals or banquets with her Italian allies. The great length of oak, however, was only occupied by two people.  
  
They sat at the centre, directly opposite each other, only a metre-and-a-half apart, perhaps. Closer than they had been so far. Cleopatra observed the man with a strange satisfaction – she liked him, and the way he spoke to her and the way he hadn’t tiptoed around her for the sake of trying to please ‘his Queen’. Instead, when they arrived in the dining room, the Doctor had spent a good deal of time running around the walls and admiring the artworks.  
“No wine?” the Doctor seemed surprise.  
  
“Oh yes, I’ll have the wine. But I am not your Queen. No – you come from far away.”  
  
The Doctor poured the bitter red, looking up at Cleo as he did so. “How do you know?”  
  
“Firstly, you stride around my palace with a strange, magic… wand –”  
  
The Doctor couldn’t help but chuckle aloud at Cleo’s unknowingness as to the origins of the sonic screwdriver.  
  
“– and you and Lizzie wear such… abnormal clothes.”  
  
The Doctor sighed, pouring some wine for himself. It was an explanation that actually, he did not find himself giving too often. Most people didn’t care. “Cleo… it’s a very long explanation, one which I’m sure you don’t need to be –”  
  
Fury washed over her – Cleopatra could not abide with the petulance of the little man sat opposite her. “Doctor, I will not mindlessly accept everything you do. This is my empire, I worked hard to build it up as it is, and I will not be judged upon the entertainment or pleasure that I bring you. You must improve the way you speak to me.”  
  
The Doctor blushed, and spluttered a few words out, not quite sure what to say, before eventually he settled on something. “I don’t think you would believe me."  
  
“Have we not been over this several times?” Cleopatra was mocking, and scathing. Her tongue was almost as sharp as the sword of the executioner she’d made certain the Doctor had seen when they made their way to the dining room.  
  
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” the Doctor backtracked – and not because he was scared of the executioner’s sword. Cleo was right – she did not deserve to be spoken to in such a way. “Lizzie and I… we’re time travellers.”  
  
Cleo took a sip from her wine, and glanced at the ceramic mug to make sure she hadn’t already become intoxicated. No – the glass was full. Perhaps finally the Doctor had found something to tell her that would truly make her question her wellbeing.  
  
“Look me in the eye,” Cleopatra leaned away from the Doctor. “Look me in the eye and tell me that this is real.”  
  
“Don’t you believe me?” the Doctor retorted straight away, not sounding remotely surprised.  
  
“You’re a liar at heart. The one thing reaffirming my faith in you is that Lizzie is genuine.”  
  
The Doctor smiled, thinking of his new companion, and how he couldn’t imagine her being able to lie to anybody. “I suppose she is quite… believable.”  
“You barely know her,” Cleo could read the Doctor like a book.  
  
“You can’t read me like a book,” the Doctor could read Cleo like a book. “I could tell you all sorts of lies and you wouldn’t know what was fact and what was fiction.”  
  
“I think I could. And I think you could with me,” Cleopatra smirked at the Doctor’s almost-arrogance. He was so used to being unfathomable, that for once, all it took was for someone to believe him, and instantly he became understandable. “Though you definitely cannot with your companion.”  
  
“Oh? And why’s that?” The Doctor refused to believe that Cleo, who had only met Lizzie once, and had only had a short conversation with her, would be able to read her better than he could.  
  
“She is one of the most observant women I have set eyes upon. She has already read you thrice over, Doctor, and believe me, if she wanted to lie to you, she could do it with ease. But I know she is being truthful here. I could see the awe in her eyes as she admired the city from the balcony. No – I am certain I am not going mad. I wanted to see how you would react.”  
  
A silence descended upon them, as Cleopatra smugly drank her wine, the taste of having argued with the Doctor and won being sickly sweet.  
  
“If you’re a time traveller, why are you here?”  
  
Cleopatra assumed that the Doctor and Lizzie were from some kind of future. She had always wanted her legacy to be that of a good Queen – though she couldn’t bring herself to ask the Doctor what people truly thought of her.  
  
“You’re… so  _interesting_  –,” the Doctor began, before Cleopatra quickly shut him up.  
  
“I am not some kind of specimen,” she declared, determined to put the Doctor to rights, and sick of the way he spoke of her.  
  
“No, I don’t mean like that –,” the Doctor paused, observing the Queen’s mischievous grin. “– are you just mucking around?”  
  
“No, I am making sure you see your self-righteous, sanctimonious self for who you truly are.”  
  
For the first time in their conversation, the Doctor bothered to stop and think about what he was saying, putting thought and effort into the words, in the knowledge that they were going to make an impact on somebody.  
  
“You are one of the most fascinating historical figures in… ever. Fact or fiction, who knows –  _nobody_   _knows_  about you.”  
  
Cleo wished she hadn’t heard him say that, taking a quick, anxious swig of her wine, and hoping that it didn’t mean what she thought. She didn’t build her empire to be remembered as just someone – she built up her empire to be remembered for someone good.  
  
“Nobody remembers me?” Cleo eventually questioned him. She still wasn’t sure whether she wanted to know, and her mind was constantly changing. She decided she had to.  
  
“Oh, Cleo – they remember you –”  
  
“Then,” the first sounds of concern crept into Cleo’s voice. “What do you mean? Do they remember me well? Oh, Doctor, please – tell me they remember me well.”  
  
The Doctor paused – now it wasn’t as if he were thinking of generic words he was going to have to say for the first time. Now he was thinking of important words.  
  
“You’re remembered as a story, Cleo. People know you for… so many things. And that’s why we’re here. Because we wanted to know who’s behind the story.”  
  
Cleo wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. There was something strangely exciting about it – but what she wanted more than anything else was –  
  
“You must tell people,” Cleo declared. A look of shock flew across the Doctor’s face, his features suggesting that he wanted to do everything he could to stop the last few minutes of conversation from happening. “Tell people the truth. Let me be a story, but let me be a true story. Teach people about me.”  
The Doctor looked at her sorrowfully, and her face fell. She knew what he was going to say.  
  
“I can’t.”  
  
“You have a time machine, stupid man! Use it for good! Teach as many people as you can. You can’t let people live lies.”  
  
The Doctor wanted to lie to her, he wanted to say that he would, just so that she wouldn’t be disappointed. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it after everything she’d said to him. There would be some way of explaining it, perhaps – though it didn’t seem as if what he would say, any scientific technobabble, would be able to make Queen Cleopatra understand.  
  
“Time travel doesn’t work like that,” was all he could finally muster. Cleopatra glared at him, as if she were asking him what kind of terrible excuse it was.  
“Then what’s the point?”  
  
The Doctor shrugged. Even after all this time, he still didn’t really know.  
   
***  
   
Just as the Cybermen had patched up the natural with the artificial, they had done the same to the lower levels of Cleopatra’s palace, attaching electric lights to the ancient sandstone. Just as there was a disharmony between the technological advances strapped onto the Cybermen, it was strange looking at sleek, white bulbs attached to the ceilings, with neat cables carefully managed, attached to the walls. The Cybermen were clearly not a messy people.  
  
Nephthys, meanwhile, looked around in awe at the electronics, as they slowly made their way downwards – it seemed as if the narrow corridor was leading somewhere below. It was always below, wasn’t it? The people up to no good always seemed to hide out in some basement or cellar. Lizzie and Nephthys always made sure they were far enough behind the Cyberman, so it couldn’t suddenly turn and spot them. The tight walkway twisted and turned, giving them plenty of space to duck out of sight.  
  
They walked as silently as they could, trying to walk almost as quietly as the slapping of bandaged feet on the floor, and trying to stop themselves from breathing. In the bright, clinical white lights in the belly of the palace, there was nothing but quiet, and Lizzie could hear that the Cybermen did not breath.  
  
It felt as if the intestinal corridor went on forever, worming and burrowing its way through the sand and the Earth. The clean, white lights were equally spaced along the ceiling, always exactly perfect – there was no distinction as to whether this was the start or the end of the catacomb, apart from the sounds of the night and the pyramid’s nightlife growing ever-distant.  
  
Then the corridor opened out into a wider room. It looked as if it had been dug out by the Cybermen, with metallic beams propping up the ceiling and the walls. A circular table, like a gigantic, 3D CD, had been constructed in the centre of the chamber, with the white light of a screen bursting from the top, and placed along the metal beams were various screens, with keyboards set up beneath them. From this presumed base of operations, a series of tunnels led off – four in total, in several different directions. The most significant was a slightly larger doorway, with artificial plastic flaps dangling down, almost like something from an abattoir, a place of industrial slaughter.

Two Cybermen stood in front of the disc-shaped computer, crusty, bandaged fingers dragging through various different records and instruments. They were not identical, instead they were like crazy-paving, each built with a menagerie of human and artificial parts. When they spoke, their voices were of different pitches, like human voices – but both were recognisable with that chilling, broken-autotuned twang.  
  
“Conversion of the deceased will begin. Prepare the body.”  
  
“The body is in the chamber. Purification is in process.”  
  
“I will operate.”  
  
The two Cybermen left their computer, and strode through the plastic sheeting, giving no notice to it as it brushed over their handlebar heads.  
  
Lizzie poked her head into the chamber, and surprised herself with her willingness to throw herself into danger.  
  
“I think it’s okay,” she slipped around into the chamber, sticking close to the wall. Nephthys followed her out, but unlike Lizzie, she walked straight to the computer in the middle.  
  
“Are these people travellers as well?” Nephthys gave the text on the table a funny glance, unable to decipher the unknown language it was written in.  
  
“Yeah… I think so.”  
  
Nephthys walked over to the plastic sheeting, and looked at it reluctantly. Lizzie examined it, if for no reason but to delay time and think of her next move.  
She held it open for Nephthys and they crept quietly through, loitering in a convenient gap in the wall, a gap containing a generator. If they both craned their heads out, they could see a much larger room. Except, unlike the previous one, it was almost entirely original, constructed of solid blocks of sand, with beautiful paintings and etchings of Gods on the walls. The biggest artwork sat alone on one of the walls – it was a person, with a human body, and a jackal for a head. A crook was gripped tightly in its hands. In the centre, was a big slab – and on top of the slab, was a body.  
  
The one difference was the medical trolley which waited beside the slab, a series of scalpels and forceps lined neatly on top. A second medical trolley was on the other side, on top of which stood several painted wood jars, decorated in ornate Egyptian artwork, and with animal shapes carved eloquently into the top. A flashback to her school days, and Lizzie remembered visiting the Ashmolean in Oxford, and seeing canopic jars as one of the exhibits.  
  
A cold, naked body was splayed out on the slab, with only a towel protecting its modesty. A third Cyberman joined the other two, and all three of them peeled purple, latex gloves onto their already bandaged hands, and strapped surgical masks onto their faces. They looked so unusual – Egyptian corpses donning modern medical equipment.  
  
“Beginning conversion.”  
  
The Cyberman took a scalpel and set to work.  
  
Again, another school flashback, and Lizzie remembered learning about mummification. Of course, it hadn’t seemed quite as graphic when she was ten.  
  
Then she remembered Nephthys, and thought that she should probably stop her from watching – but they were both glued to the scenes, as if they were having a cosy night in watching a warped, sick medical drama.  
  
The Cybermen worked logically, methodically, and practically. Nothing was said, apart from a few uttered commands here and there. The process went, as it presumably had several times before. The Cybermen did not flinch at the sight of blood, or at organs or muscles or tissue, of which there was lots. Soon the purple gloves were bathed in blood.  
  
All that happened then was the worst thing that could have happened.  
  
“My…………………………………………………………………………”  
  
It was speaking. The body was alive.  
  
Except, when it spoke, it no longer spoke as if it were human – the electronics in the voicebox had been implemented, and so it spoke as the others did – in a computerised buzz, still retaining a glimpse of its human history, but nothing more – everything was lost to the wrong intonation and emphasis on the words. And on top of the artificiality, when it spoke, the gurgle of blood and flehm in the throat was audible.  
  
“My……… name………. is………….”  
  
The Cybermen did not waver. They kept working.  
  
“Where……………………… is…………………………… my………………………… daughter.”  
  
Lizzie had to look away, turning to the dark depths of the generator behind her. Nephthys couldn’t look away.  
  
“I……………………………… want……………………. my………………………… daughter.”  
  
She wanted to be sick – she could feel the vomit and bile rising up to the top of her throat.  
  
“I………………………… want……………………….”  
  
All that could be heard then was the sound of a cold, metallic crying, and a hollow sniffling, as the last reaches of emotion in the man died. Lizzie looked left and right, to make sure nobody could see her, and then she left the little porch, making her way back into the original chamber.  
  
“Are you alright?” Nephthys had followed her out. Lizzie suddenly realised she was crying, when she felt a salty tear merge with her saliva.  
  
“Yeah… yeah, I’m fine,” then she looked at the little girl, who was trying her best not to seem disturbed or upset. Lizzie could see that inside, she was crumbling.  
  
As soon as she held out her arms, Nephthys ran into them, and Lizzie held her tight, making sure that the girl felt safe and protected. She wanted to tell her that everything was going to be alright, but although she held Nephthys close to her, she hadn’t felt as alone as this while being on board the TARDIS. She had no idea what to do – no idea what to say that could make things any better – all while the stupid Doctor she’d just met was swanning around upstairs with Cleopatra. If he was here, she’d punch him. Actually, she’d just get a little bit irritable. She looked at Nephthys again. No, she’d punch him.  
  
“You’re going to be safe,” Lizzie knelt down in front of Nephthys, hoping that it was true. As she felt lonelier than ever before, abandoned in some tomb beneath some palace in 44 BC, she had no idea if it was or not. “Trust me, okay. I… know someone. And he’s going to help.”  
  
She really hoped he was going to, at least.  
  
Lizzie reached for her phone, and called the Doctor.


	7. Cleo and the Mummy (part 3)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor and Lizzie face off against the Cybermen, and get ready to tell the story of a queen of ancient Egypt...
> 
> Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy this chapter!

“You are the most selfish man I have ever met. And believe me, I’ve met many selfish men.”  
  
The Doctor found himself fumbling around for words to try and justify what he was trying to say, but there weren’t any. The idea of their being laws of time was a stupid one. Do not interfere, do not topple the great Jenga tower of time. And yet, he found himself having to abide by them.  
  
“I’m sorry,” was all he could think of to say.  
  
“You could use a time machine for so much good – and yet, you don’t.”  
  
“Life isn’t fair.”  
  
Again, a meaningless cliché – but it was all that he could find.  
  
“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try!”  
  
Her voice was raised, and she slammed the wine cup down on the table, hard enough to make the plates and cutlery rattle against the wood. A silence fell, and the two of them looked awkwardly around the room, refusing to make eye contact.  
  
“I’m sorry,” she said, curtly. “I’m sure that no matter how much I disagree, you are bound by laws. Though there is nothing wrong with me disagreeing with them. And I do.”  
  
_I can tell_ , thought the Doctor, even though he agreed with her.  
  
“I have walked many places. I’ve seen… so many things, so many stories. And I can’t tell anybody. But sometimes I can – and maybe one person, or two people, will get to share it with me. That’s the best I can do… I just have to try and concentrate on the fact that at least somebody knows.”  
  
After the Doctor opened his heart to her, another awkward silence followed. They could argue, but it seemed that when it came to talking, they weren’t very good at it. Another reason that the Doctor and Cleo were alike – their reluctance to divulge information.  
  
Then, the Doctor’s satchel began to peculiarly vibrate. The Doctor looked around sheepishly, and pulled out his phone. Cleo eyed it uncertainly, and the Doctor explained to her what it was. Facebook had left her in an even greater state of confusion than time travel had.  
  
“Lizzie?”  
  
“Doctor… it’s me.”  
  
“Lizzie, have you found anything?”  
  
“Yes… yeah, we have.”  
  
He detected a hint of reluctance in her voice – nothing much, but there was something there. “Are you alright?”  
  
“Hmm, me? Yeah, fine," she lied. "The Cybermen are here and… they’re turning dead people into Cybermen.”  
  
“Oh, clever,” the Doctor noted his excessive fascination. “Give me five minutes.”  
  
The Doctor hung up the phone, slipping it into his satchel.  
  
“Cleo! It seems you’ve got an army of vicious cyborgs living beneath your palace.”  
   
***  
   
As Lizzie flipped her phone shut, she saw Nephthys staring at the door with the plastic flaps, paralysed with fear. One of the Cybermen was there, staring at her. It slowly reached up an arm, and detached its surgical mask, and peeled off its purple, surgical gloves.  
  
“You are intruders,” its voice whirred and buzzed and droned. “You will not move.”  
  
Lizzie, aware that she was being interrogated, realised that she should probably think of some intelligent and witty retort. She didn’t, and floundered, until Nephthys stepped in.  
  
“What are you doing?” she demanded, her voice remarkably steely for a 10-year-old.  
  
“The dead will be…… converted.”  
  
“Cool,” Lizzie said, suddenly realising that she had one threat up her sleeve. She was really, really hoping it worked. And she was also… eerily intrigued. “I’m guessing you guys have databanks or something? Like, they usually do in the books and stuff.”  
  
“We have databanks.”  
  
“Then search up ‘The Doctor’.”  
  
Lizzie found herself doing rather well at sounding threatening.  
  
The Cyberman stood, as if it were searching in some prosthetic, implanted search engine.  
  
“The Doctor is irrelevant.”  
  
Then, a familiar voice came from the stairway into the tomb.  
  
“And why’s that?”  
  
A huge wave of relief washed over Lizzie, and she turned, to see the Doctor stood there, looking like the archetypal hero, with his satchel over his shoulders, and the sonic screwdriver clasped in his hand.  
  
“Hello Cybermen. Guess who?”  
  
“The Doctor is here,” three Cybermen emerged from the darkened tunnels leading to the central hub.  
  
“Why so concerned, Cybermen? What can I do to hurt you?”  
  
Five Cybermen had gathered, and they stood, watching the three of them blankly.  
  
“Because you…,” the Doctor gestured at the dilapidated control room around them, and at the ruined state of the Cybermen. “You’re nothing.”#  
  
“I wouldn’t call turning the recently deceased into cyborgs ‘nothing’…” Lizzie doubted that she’d ever be able to forget the synthesised pleas of the dying man on the operating slab.  
  
“But Lizzie, don’t you see? In the grand scheme of things!” the Doctor didn’t take his eyes off the Cybermen.  
  
“I still think that’s… that’s pretty grand.”  
  
The Doctor turned to face her, his face ashamed. “Yes. Sorry.” He gave Cleopatra an apologetic look as well, as she joined them in the room behind the Doctor.  
  
Cleopatra took in the Cybermen – the creatures that had been watching her, all of her life. “Who are you? Am I addressing the followers of Anubis? Who  _are_ you?”  
  
At that moment, the Cybermen limply raised their palms to their chests, a sort of gesture to show… respect? Service? It was as if the Cybermen were worshipping their Queen, as if they were just her courtiers.  
  
“You address me as your Queen?” Cleopatra asked, as if that had made her willing to hear what the Cybermen had to say.  
  
“Our… Queen…,” the Cybermen spoke in a disharmonic unison. Cleopatra looked at the Doctor, as if she were looking for answers.  
  
“Then, as your ruler, I command you to leave.”  
  
At that moment, everyone in the chamber looked around to the Doctor, as he gasped aloud, “I’m stupid.”  
  
“Doctor, be quiet,” Cleopatra ordered her.  
  
“Cleo, please –”  
  
She gave him a look as if that promise of the executioner’s sword were about to come to fruition. However, she let him speak.  
  
“Walk away. Trust me, just do it, just walk away. The Cybermen don’t want you at the moment.”  
  
Cleopatra opened her mouth to protest, but then glanced over at the Cybermen, and how they stood watching her. They were not planning on doing anything.  
  
“Lizzie, would you mind going to do the door? And Nephthys.”  
  
Lizzie and Nephthys did as they were told, and eventually Cleo followed.  
  
“Cybermen!” the Doctor addressed them. “We’ll be back.”  
   
***  
   
The TARDIS was parked behind a curtain in Cleopatra’s throne room, and the four of them were gathered around it.  
  
“It’s always the significant moments in your life,” the Doctor wittered on, as he shoved the TARDIS doors open and switched on the lights (rather quaintly operated by a crude 21st century light switch). “When you became Queen, when your first child was born, when Caesar was assassinated.”  
  
Lizzie watched as Nephthys nervously stepped up to the doors. The inside of the TARDIS was obscured in shadows.  
  
“What do they want with me?” Cleopatra asked, standing at a resolute distance away from the TARDIS.  
  
“Not a clue yet.”  
  
“And this is your… ship?” Nephthys asked, placing a hand on the wooden doorframe.  
  
“Yes,” Lizzie confirmed calmly, while on the inside she was secretly desperate for Nephthys to step inside and see the truth.  
  
Nephthys tentatively stepped inside.  
  
Lizzie inelegantly stumbled past Nephthys, just to get a glimpse of her wide eyes as she took in the true magnificence of the TARDIS, as the bright irises danced all in one second, trying to understand about a million things that didn’t make any sense. The time rotor pumped up and down, and that soothing, wheezing and groaning sound echoed. She understood why the Doctor had so joyously watched when she’d first set foot inside the TARDIS.  
  
“Cleo,” the Doctor walked up to the Queen. “You’ll see us again. Once more.”  
  
“How can you know this?” Cleo’s voice shook, more so than it had ever done before. She could not stay here, not with these… creatures living beneath her palace.  
  
“Because I think I know what’s happening. Roughly…”  
  
“Then tell me!” Cleo protested.  
  
“I can’t, the laws of time –”  
  
“Your laws of time are wrong.”  
  
“And they’ve hurt me enough.”  
  
Cleopatra was quiet, but the Doctor had nothing else to offer. So she continued. “They will hurt you even more.”  
  
The Doctor stepped up even closer to her, close to the Queen he had watched grow. “Stay strong, Cleo. Please – you must.”  
  
“I – I cannot stay here –”  
  
“The Cybermen won’t hurt you, don’t worry.”  
  
Cleopatra glared at him, and then turned away. “I look forward to the day you meet your maker.”  
  
The Doctor walked into the TARDIS, and shut the doors behind him.  
  
“How does it work?” Nephthys gazed in wonder at the machinery. Lizzie had no idea, and she was fairly certain that the Doctor didn’t know much either.  
_Magic_ , Lizzie smiled to herself, as the TARDIS flew away. It always made her so happy, and so elated, as all the laws of logic were defied.  
  
But then the Doctor turned and looked at them both, a solemn look on his face.  
  
  
“Where we’re going next… it won’t be pleasant,” he admitted. Neither Lizzie or Nephthys said anything – but they looked at him, waiting for him to continue.  
  
“What’s the second most significant event in your life after your birth?” the Doctor hinted, as if he didn’t want to say it out loud.  
  
Nephthys still hadn’t realised, and she turned to Lizzie.  
  
“Your death,” Lizzie said, her voice cracking as she said it.  
   
***  
   
From the balcony of Cleopatra’s bedchamber, there was chaos in the city below. Great wooden vessels, teeming with soldiers, had docked at the harbour, and their crew marched out into the great city of Alexandra.  
  
“The night Octavian captures Alexandria,” the Doctor grimaced, looking at the scenes below. “The Queen has tried every last attempt she can to try and save herself. Even tried to seduce him. In about five minutes – she will be dead.”  
  
Through the thin, netted curtains, they would see the Cyberman, stood in the corner. As expected, it was waiting at the final event of Cleopatra’s life. For what, they still didn’t know. Maybe they never would. Nobody inside the chamber, Cleopatra nor her attendants, seemed to have noticed it. Their attentions were occupied by other, more important problems.  
  
“What do we do?” Lizzie asked. She hadn’t been here before – did they go in? Did they intervene?  
  
“We wait,” the Doctor was blunt. “We know the Cyberman is here. We have all the pieces of the puzzle – we just need to put them together.”  
  
Lizzie looked at the Queen, lying in her bed, breathing thin, rasping breaths. Sweat matted her brow, and her skin a sickly colour.  
  
“We can’t just wait.”  
  
“That’s all we can do. Cleopatra dies here,  _that’s_ what happens. It’s already happened – she’ll be dead soon.”  
  
Lizzie ignored him, pushing the thin shutters separating the balcony and the bedchamber.  
  
Cleopatra looked up, and there was a shadowed figure, standing in the torchlight. Behind the person was the light from the balcony, and all Cleo could see was her billowing clothes, and hair blustering in the forceful night gales. It was a woman, she’d realised – perhaps an angel of some kind. That’s what she looked like, her dark outline against the unearthly light.  
  
When Lizzie stepped into the room, Cleo sat up. She dismissed her attendants.  
  
“Just because she’s gonna die,” Lizzie turned to the Doctor, as he walked in quietly behind her. “Doesn’t mean we can’t make a difference.”  
  
Lizzie took a seat beside Cleo’s bed, and took the Queen’s hand in hers, squeezing it tightly.  
  
“Li – Lizzie,” Cleopatra wheezed. The poison had settled in. It wouldn’t be long now – she wouldn’t have to suffer anymore.  
  
“Hello, my Queen.”  
  
“You… you don’t look… look any different.”  
  
“ _Magic_ ,” Lizzie whispered, and suddenly she realised she was crying.  
  
“I don’t believe in magic…,” Cleo managed a smile, and Lizzie couldn’t help but grin. That was okay, though – Lizzie knew that you didn’t need magic in stories.  
  
Perhaps stories were magic in themselves.  
  
“Thank you for coming… I didn’t want to die alone.”  
  
“It’s okay. You won’t be alone again.”  
  
Lizzie felt Cleo take one, final breath. It waited inside her for a while, as if holding onto the way she lived, Cleo was trying to grab onto life, just for a little bit longer.  
  
Her hand slipped away from Lizzie’s, and bounced lifelessly down by the side of the bed.  
  
Lizzie sniffled, and wiped the tears away from her eyes. She didn’t want the Doctor to see her crying.  
  
“She fought the establishment.”  
  
Lizzie suddenly realised the Doctor was saying something.  
  
“Every single day of her life, she fought for what she believed was right. Cleopatra showed everyone who she was, and she would not change for anyone. She was a good mother, and a good leader. She died for it all, as well.”  
  
Lizzie was scared that nobody would ever know that. She knew the stories, she’d seen the films. More than anything, she wanted that to change.  
  
“When I grow up,” Nephthys was stood in the doorway. Lizzie had noticed her there earlier. “When I grow up, I want to be like her.”  
   
***  
   
“I suppose that we’ll never know what the Cybermen were doing here,” the Doctor watched soldiers file into Cleopatra’s palace, staring intently as they moved with a confident swagger – they knew victory was theirs. Antony was dead. The Queen was dead.  
  
Lizzie sat glumly beside Nephthys on the wall, looking at the ocean below them. It seemed blacker than it had done when Lizzie had watched it before, years ago now. Was it years ago, or days? It was going to take her a while to adjust to the whole concept of time being completely changed beneath her feet.  
  
The soldiers weren’t taking any notice of them. They didn’t really seem to care for anything apart from their orders and the fact victory was theirs. A strange chill sat in the air – nothing unusual for the night, but for some reason it felt even more bitter and eerie than the night air usually did.  
  
“It’s kind of… sad,” Lizzie mumbled, originally intending it to sound a little bit deeper than it came out. “Kind of spooky as well… being here as a Queen is toppled.”  
  
Lizzie tried to make herself seem as if she were okay (because she wasn’t really). She’d just watched someone die. And she didn’t care what the Doctor went on about time or whatever – Lizzie had done something good.  
  
Nephthys nodded, and Lizzie looked at her sadly – a girl who had perhaps seen more than she should ever had to have seen. The Doctor didn’t say anything – instead he watched the events at the palace, his eyes not moving from the scene.  
  
“She was so powerful. So… strong,” Lizzie murmured, and then stopped, because nobody seemed to care.  
  
The Doctor bristled, and then she definitely shut up.  
  
But her murmuring was more because she was putting extra effort into forming an idea in her mind, putting the puzzle pieces together, and trying to formulate everything they’d learned.  
  
_Everything we’ve learned._  
  
“What if the Cybermen were studying Cleo?”  
  
The waves continued to buffet against the rocky walls, splashing gently against the molluscs and the seaweed and the algae. The muffled shouts of commands and orders echoed in the distance.  
  
_Clearly not_.  
  
It made sense, didn’t it? She was a powerful ruler. If Lizzie were a Queen, she’d certainly be taking notes.  
  
“That’s it!” the Doctor yelled, vigorously waving his arms, and catching the attention of a few soldiers laughed deep, drunken laughs. Nephthys was beginning to realise as well, and a broad grin spread across her face. The Doctor ran over the paving slabs and pulled Lizzie into a hug. “You’re a genius!”  
He broke off the hug, and began a strange sort of run towards the palace.  
  
Lizzie hadn’t moved since the Doctor’s little outburst and stood trying to absorb what had actually happened. Nephthys poked her, and Lizzie looked down at the little girl.  
  
“Your friend is a bit…”  
  
“Yeah…”  
  
Lizzie hesitated.  
  
“I, erm, don’t know. I’ve been with him, what, two days? And I’ve been trapped beneath a pyramid… the dead were walking, and Cleopatra drank Earl Grey with him.”  
  
_As the Doctor darted through the palace gates, the soldiers didn’t even try and stop him – they just glanced around in sheer confusion, doing rubbish-soldiering, and let the Doctor pass, as he rushed through the palace._  
  
_Lizzie had worked it out – and he was so happy he had taken her with him, because he would be completely useless without her. Before the Doctor left, he only had one more thing to do._  
  
_He had to let the Cybermen know._  
  
_Well – and then there was another thing as well, but that could come later._  
  
_Gradually he zipped down to the lower levels, into the corridors that wormed their way around the basements and cellars and larders and dungeons of the palace that had once belonged to Cleopatra. He knew exactly where he was going – he was pretty certain he’d memorised it before._  
  
“Who is he?” Nephthys eventually asked her, as they sat and looked out the busy port, over towards the setting sun, and the stars rising in its place. It looked almost like an astronomical filter over the sunset – over a harbour with wooden sailing boats and cargo ships and privateers and travellers from distant lands, carrying exotic spices and rare technologies and old furniture, and all that other stuff that’s often handled in miscellaneous harbours. It was life, captured in one moment, with all those people, men, women and children, and the dogs and cats, right down to the mice scuttling about between crates and ceramic jars and china tea sets, each being able to taste the salty aroma of the ocean on their tongue, an aroma so strong it crept to the back of the lungs.  
  
Lizzie shrugged. She didn’t really know.  
  
“He’s the Doctor.”  
  
She knew some things, though. She knew a bit.  
  
“I know, for sure, that the Doctor won’t let children cry.”  
  
_The Doctor quickened his pace – he didn’t have long. But he remembered Nephthys, the little girl from earlier, who had been so terrified of the Cybermen, and of what the Cybermen had done. He ran. Suddenly the ground violently shook, and then ricocheted from its shaking, sending the Doctor tumbling forwards. Plumes of dust exploded from the ceiling, giving him a dusting of sand and gravel. He took a breath as he threw himself forward onto his feet, letting the filth fill his throat._  
  
_It was happening now._  
  
_He saw the door ahead of him – the one that led deep down to the Cybermen’s lair._  
  
“And... I think the Doctor will go to impossible lengths. Maybe even too much, sometimes.”  
  
_As the Doctor reached the sliding door, it had descended, slamming into the stone. He fumbled around in his satchel and pulled out the sonic screwdriver, thrashing the button over and over, desperate for the door to open._  
  
_“Deadlock seal,” he spat dust out of his mouth._  
  
_He knelt down, grabbing the stone of the door beneath his fingers, and pulled upwards, as hard as he could. It was a stone slab, he told himself – of course it wasn’t going to open. But he tried it again, feeling the nails tear away from his skin. It was agony within his fingertips, but he wouldn’t give up._  
  
_He couldn’t._  
  
_It shifted, just a little – it shifted enough for him to get more appendages under. The Doctor gripped, and pushed against the floor. The stone scraped against the ceiling, just a bit more, and moved enough for him to slip his fingers through the Earth and get underneath the door._  
  
_When he lifted with his arms, the agony from his fingertips burst up to his shoulders and upper arms. Tears filled his eyes, and he pushed up, one final time._  
  
_The door opened, leaving the passageway to the depths of the castle open._  
  
“But one thing is for sure… he’ll always try, if it’s something he believes in.”  
  
Lizzie searched for anything else she knew about the Doctor. But that was all. Other than the obvious stuff, of course.  
  
“He’s got a wife. But he’s still sad – I can see it. I like to believe I can see right through him… but I don’t know,” she looked at the palace – she was on edge. Even though the Doctor seemed to know what was going on, he was pretty good at getting into all sorts of scrapes.  
  
“Perhaps,” she continued. “Half the time he doesn’t know himself. A lot of the time, that’s what he’s trying to do.”  
  
_The labyrinthine passage spiralled on, and on, and on. As the Doctor ran, the clinical, white lights above him were flickering on and off, and twice he was showered in sparks from the burning electrics. Along with the fiery rain, a deluge of dust and sand and earth was thrashing down from the ceiling. It wouldn’t be long before the Cybermen were leaving, and so he was hurling himself downwards, feeling the warm ground scratch against his skin._  
  
_Eventually, he reached the bottom, to the chamber with the circular computer – six Cybermen stood around it, all hybrids of bandages and buttons, and wires and skin and metal, all probably with livers in canopic jars, and tissue that had been yanked out with crude, steel hooks. One of them turned to him._  
_“It is the Doctor,” it sang, in its tuneless, uncanny voice._  
  
_“I know what you were doing,” he said, his voice hoarse, as he gasped for air that had been absorbed by the falling ceiling of the palace’s corridors._  
_The Cybermen stared at him blankly. “It is irrelevant. We have completed our mission.”_  
  
_“Li – Lizzie worked it out, she’s very clever – cleverer than you are, for sure. Cleverer than me, absolutely. You were studying her.”_  
  
_Again, the Cybermen didn’t waver. Three of them turned back to the computer, as their spaceship began to launch. It wouldn’t be long before the ground above them collapsed in on itself, and a huge metal hulk erupted from the sand._  
  
_“You knew how she was such a powerful Queen, and you admired her, and the way she built such an effective empire. So you came here to learn from her!”_  
  
_“Correct.”_  
  
_The Doctor stared at them all, and the Cybermen stared back, awkwardly. “Erm, yes. That’s it, really. Bye for now.”_  
  
_He turned and ran back up the way he came – in about a minute and a half, the Cybermen would leave Earth’s atmosphere, and would journey off into space, to whatever scheme they had concocted next._  
  
_And if they were going to hurt anyone? Well – he would be there._  
  
_The ceiling was falling down around him, the downpour of bricks and mortar turning into a tsunami. Eventually, he slogged through the sand, and came out onto the corridor beyond the sliding door. The corridor behind him exploded, throwing him forwards, as a fireball blew up behind him._  
  
_He smacked against the stone bricks, as a cloud of sparks burst and crackled above his head, singeing the top of his hair and his beard. He touched it mournfully._  
  
“And I think,” Lizzie said, acknowledging the last thing that she knew about the Doctor. “That probably, a lot of the time, he needs more help than he admits. Just a minute – I’ll be back.”  
  
As Lizzie ran through the gates of the palace, the guards looked around in confusion, as some kind of earthquake was violently shaking the palace back and forth, sending horses and camels wild, and sending bricks and slabs slipping down from the roofs and the turrets. She could roughly remember the way down to the Cybermen’s dungeon – she took a few sets of stairs downwards, knowing that wherever the Doctor was, he’d probably be there.  
  
As she neared the basement, the tremors grew even more forceful – Lizzie was sure that she was on the right track.  
  
Eventually, she arrived at the corridor with the porch she’d hidden in with Nephthys, and the sliding door leading to the Cybermen. The Doctor was ahead of her, trudging his way over some kind of huge, sandstone breezeblock.  
  
When he looked up and saw her, he breathed a huge sigh of relief.  
  
“Come on!” she reached forward, and grabbed his hand, pulling him through the rubble. The dust and sand had formed a permanent cloud, omnipresent in the air, drawing tears from their eyes, and forcing them to cough dry, hacking coughs. The Doctor, mid-cough, reached towards her hand, and grabbed it, holding on as tight as he could. Lizzie tugged him forwards, and he stumbled into her.  
  
“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” she watched as he attempted to regain balance. “Are you alright?”  
  
“Yes, yes, I’m fine! Come on, let’s get out of here…”  
  
As the Doctor thought about what he’d been thinking before, he realised that he’d been wrong. If the Cybermen were going to hurt anyone again, it wouldn’t be him waiting for them.  
  
It would be the Doctor and Lizzie Darwin.  
  
He had to concentrate again, as he realised Lizzie was having to pull him up a narrow set of steps.  
   
***  
   
The Doctor tentatively poked at the burned patch of his beard, cremated in the launching of the Cybermen’s spaceship.  
  
The Doctor and Lizzie had eventually managed to escape the palace, albeit blanketed in debris, and they had come face to face with a Nephthys who giggled at how messy they looked. Five seconds after they escaped, the sound of a million aircraft engines at once deafened the three of them, and all the soldiers stood in complete confusion and bemusement.  
  
All of them watched as a huge, spinning lump of metal, almost as patchwork as the people who operated it, tore from the ground like someone uprooting a tree, and jetted off into the stars above.  
  
The sun was nearly set, now.  
  
Surprisingly, most of the palace was still standing – clearly when the Cybermen had crashed, they had made sure that they’d picked a sensible crash site, upon which nothing had been built since.  
  
“A few thousand years from now,” the Doctor pointed at the sea. “A great tsunami will come and destroy the rest of this palace, and the lighthouse.”  
  
Nephthys danced a funny little dance as she realised what the Doctor was saying. “The Cybermen! They’ll come back and destroy it.”  
  
“Nephthys,” Lizzie turned to the little Egyptian girl suddenly. “You should write all this down. As a story.”  
  
The Doctor looked at her hesitantly, as if he should say something. He decided not to.  
  
“About the Cybermen?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Nephthys nodded, and then hugged Lizzie. “Thank you,” she whispered, before breaking away, and giving the Doctor an awkward little wave. Then she scampered off into the night, with a whole wealth of adventures to write down.  
  
Lizzie looked over at the chaotic palace, at the swathes of people dashing around, trying to make sense as to what had happened. The same was happening in the port – the humdrum conversations of goods transportation and the fall of a monarch had instead been replaced by why a great big thing just flew out of the ground and into the sky. She was sure that the Doctor had said that they shouldn’t topple the great Jenga tower of time or something. He was stood, looking out over the sea melancholically towards the horizon.  
  
“This is what it’s like all the time,” he stood up, jumped off the wall, and walked over to the TARDIS. He pushed opened the doors.  
 “Do you still want to travel with me?”  
  
“Yeah,” she mumbled awkwardly. “Why wouldn’t I?”  
  
“I… I don’t know. I suppose it’s been quite a day – you’ve seen the whole reign of Cleopatra in just a few hours and you’ve seen barbaric cyborgs from outer space converting the dead – it’s not usually as… heavy-going as that, first time around.”  
  
“Of course I want to come. You make mistakes. You mucked around with Cleopatra, treated her life as if you were just… a robot. I can’t let you go around doing that.”

The Doctor looked up at her, a sheepish look on his face, and he was grateful. She was right, and he was definitely wrong. And he regretted everything he’d done. Mistakes he’d made before had come back to haunt him, and he needed Lizzie to prevent him from doing them again.  
  
As Lizzie watched him, she knew who the Doctor was. Or at least, she knew enough.  
  
So, she stepped through the doors into the bigger-on-the-inside box, when suddenly she turned as the Doctor shut the doors behind her.  
  
“Does the TARDIS have a speaker?”  
  
“Absolutely,” the Doctor walked over to a subwoofer speaker – he flicked a switch, and blew a layer of dust off the top. “The connector is just there,” he pointed to a wire on the console. Lizzie plugged in her phone, and the Doctor launched the TARDIS off into the stars.  
  
Then he sat back on the leather seat in anticipation of the music.  
  
_A thousand thundering thrills await me_  
  
_Facing insurmountable odds gratefully_  
  
_The female of the species is more deadly than the male_  
  
Lizzie looked shyly towards him as the electronic drumbeat and xylophones rang throughout the halls of the TARDIS, as if she were opening up some part of her that had, so far, remained hidden. Music was a powerful thing, and Lizzie waited awkwardly, leaning against the console and humming quietly to herself. It was the sort of moment where one should probably sing, or dance, or something – but they were both absorbed in the melody, and the lyrics – and it was strangely comfortable anyway.  
  
“Oh…,” Lizzie remembered something. “One more thing.”  
  
“I think I know what you’re going to say.”  
  
The Doctor had been thinking exactly the same thing.  
  
“You remember the professor? Ameera?”  
  
“I do,” the Doctor stood up from the seat, and pulled down a lever. He had already typed the coordinates into the machine.  
  
“Oh? Are you… okay with it now?”  
  
“Yes. I think three wise women made me realise. Time to use time travel for good.”  
  
Seconds later, they arrived in the library again, in 2017. Ameera couldn’t believe her eyes.  
  
“Fact or fiction… who knows,” the Doctor strode to the TARDIS doors, opening up a universe of adventure. “Cleopatra was the greatest enigma, a victim to her misconception, and it’s about time we did something about that. When we do things we previously thought of as impossible, we just accept them. Because… the world is strange enough. And perhaps with Cleopatra… nobody bothered to unwrap the impossible… and so she  _became_ impossible. Until now.”  
  
As the TARDIS flew away, Lizzie was happy. She was more than happy. Cleopatra had wanted her story told.  
  
Finally, it had happened.


End file.
